


What Stays and What Fades

by ivyspinners



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Torture, Minor Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus, Miscommunication, Misunderstandings, Pining, Reunions, Touching, undergoing minor edits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-15 13:11:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9236594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyspinners/pseuds/ivyspinners
Summary: There is no room for her. There is barely room for him. She tugs her mother's kyber crystal from around her neck and tucks into into his hand."Go," she tells the pilot, who she does not know. She would trust each person on board with her life. She cannot trust them with their own, so she locks her gaze to the pilot as a last resort. "Go!"(Cassian and Jyn both survive Scarif. Each thinks the other is dead.)





	1. Prologue

There is wind and there is pain. There is the stolen fighter vessel, and laser fire overhead, and Cassian bleeding into unconsciousness in her arms.

There is a choice. There is one choice.

"Take him," she yells over the roar of starfighter engines. Cassian's body drags against durasteel; her bad leg cramps with effort.

Baze untangles himself from a set of twisted limbs to help. He cannot move his legs, and she can hardly walk, but the distance shrinks. They heave and shove and lift until Cassian thumps into place.

There is no room for her. There is barely room for him. She tugs her mother's kyber crystal from around her neck and tucks into into his hand.

"Go," she tells the pilot, who she does not know. She would trust each person on board with her life. She cannot trust them with their own, so she locks her gaze to the pilot as a last resort. "Go!"

He is a rebel. He knows Captain Andor; he does not know Jyn Erso, and for him, there is no choice. He nods. The vessel's doors slam shut.

She watches from Citadel Tower as the vessel leaves Scarif, the pilot's contact codes and frequency burned into memory. Her heart lurches as it drops, engine sputtering; her fingers dig into her palms even as it rises again. She holds her breath until it clears the planet.

In the end, her sacrifice means nothing. She loses them anyway.

\--

Jyn is dreaming of the past again. She doesn't like it.

In her dream she clutches the transmitter with fingers gone numb, fingernails missing, and the taste of blood in her mouth. Each breath is a spike of pain. She should be resting, healing, but this is more important.

The pilot, who now refuses to give his name, says, _They're safe._

 _Where?_ she asks. Speech claws at her raw throat.

 _Here,_ he responds, brutally cryptic, and Jyn teeters between fury and relief. _Alderaan._ A shift of the camera; she sees figures floating in a bacta tank. _Those are the friends you saved._

Even on the most secure line Jyn could find, he will not say Cassian's name. Jyn would not either.

In reality, the conversation ended by mutual agreement, but here it dives straight into the end of her second transmission. She opens her mouth to ask something else, anything else.

The signal vanishes. All attempts to reconnect fail.

It is a day later that she learns of Alderaan's destruction, and for a moment, every excruciating minute of pain before is overshadowed. She feels like a blunt knife is carving out her heart. On Scarif she had not wanted to die, but she had made her peace with it. She cannot imagine surviving this.

Even if she has before.

Jyn jerks awake. As always, she opens her eyes to the knowledge it was not a dream.

\--

She does not return to the Rebellion. Loss is an old enemy nipping at her heels, and she cannot stand the thought of someone dictating the boundaries of her grief. She has been through this before.

There is nothing waiting for her with the Rebellion but, at worst, suspicion. She's been through that before too.

Maybe if she had fought with it. Maybe if they had believed her. Maybe if the face of the Rebellion, to her, were not dead and gone. Maybe if she had lived a life where she didn't have to wonder _maybe_.

On Issor, which like all prosperous centers holds a considerable underbelly, a slicer recreates her as Brianna Sotar. It takes all the credits she won in games of Sabbac, along with a pledge for smuggled starship parts. A fair exchange.

"Liana Hallik is a wanted name in three star systems," the slicer informs her. His voice rings, metallic, his right arm made of plasteel. "Would you like me to scrub your face from the records?"

Liana Hallik is a safer name. Galen Erso breathed his last, weeks ago, but Jyn Erso stood in front of a hundred people and threatened the Death Star. Kestrel Dawn screamed in a Star Destroyer until she passed out then stole a ship to escape. The Empire will not forget. Jyn shakes her head.

She wins enough from another night of games buy a ticket out of Imperial territory.

\--

She liberates both a ship and its cargo of weapons from a petty dictator and sells them on Nar Shaddaa, where commodities change hands so quickly, it's impossible to find the source. The ship may be stolen, but the parts are still good. She hears of the Rebellion mingled with names like _Skywalker_ and _Organa_ , and, strangely enough, _Galen Erso, he was loyal to the Empire and look where it got him_. No one mentions Rogue One. Just whispers of _Jedi_ and the Death Star collapsing from within.

It is old news, but Jyn was not in a state to appreciate it until now.

"The size of a planet and he knew where to shoot. If that's not the Force, nothing is."

"Pah. I heard his people found the plans first."

"Guess the Rebellion had its own resources after all."

A lull of silence in the cantina as people turn to listen. Smoke curls in the air, so sickly sweet she wants to retch.

"Bodies to throw away."

Stay still. Don't react. This is no place to start an argument.

She breaks the glass of Naboo Firewater (which is almost certainly not from Naboo, with that sour sting) and shoves her neighbor to the ground. There is no honesty in her words, but there are in her fists. She had known a man, she tries to forget, who fought from the age of six, knowing the last person he killed would be himself. She would have died for him. Instead, she sent him to his death.

Her knuckles are bruised, after, and her lip split, but it is a small price to pay.

She buys a ship too small to brave the Triellus Trade Route, but good enough for her purposes, and leaves. When she is in hyperspace, Jyn toasts the occasion with a bottle of Correllian rum small enough to fit in her palm. She whispers the names that were forgotten. They drop like stones in her heart.

\--

Jyn runs weapons. This sort of life, at least, is familiar, and her clients are not people who follow Imperial law. Sometimes they even knew her before, as Liana or Tanith. Kestrel, if they were particularly unlucky. Planning, execution, and retreat keep her too busy to think of much else. A blessing.

She runs, and if the weapons she ships end up in rebel hands, all the better. It is not her concern what they do with her shipments. She does not stay to see their plans succeed, although she does, on occasion, give them passage off-planet for a bartered favor. Wobani was not her first prison and will not be her last; she will need those favors in the future.

Sometimes, she even admits that she seeks the rebels out. She does not join them. But she helps.

\--

It is only in the quiet of hyperspace that she lets herself remember a thing. The past always returns with a vengeance.

The memory of Cassian tracing his thumb over the back of her calloused knuckles feels as vivid as reality. It was the only time he had touched her outside of communication while under attack. Baze's hand on her shoulder in silent understanding, as though he too understood what it was to lose a cause, and then find it again. Bodhi curled up on their ship as his home burned to ashes, devastation lining his face. He had watched the city collapse and led them to Eadu right after.

Chirrut on the ground at Yavin IV, as Baze sifted through his weapons, quiet and pensive. _I am one with the Force and the Force with me._ Baze grunting, half-annoyance, half-laughter, responding, _I didn't marry the Force. I married you._

If she thinks of Cassian more than the others. Sometimes, his face appears in the middle of a crowd, striking her still until she blinks and recognizes the mirage. It is not surprising. He had been the first she met, and the first she trusted, and then the first to betray that trust. She does not let herself consider anything more.

When she lands, she scrubs her memories from her face. Maybe even from the surface of her mind. Jyn is good at forgetting.

She is even better at pretending.

\--

Some days, she thinks Rogue One is like the scars on the soles of her feet. When she first tried to walk one year ago, every step was agony. Now, she cannot feel the ground through the thick knots of scar tissue. Sensation is a memory.

But if she focuses, there is still the phantom touch of wire digging in until she screamed.

\--

In what Jyn will later label as a moment of recklessness, even for herself, she accepts a client who wants her to deliver to Arkanis. Landing only tightens the muscles of her neck, her back, beyond anxiety; Imperial flags sprout from every surface as far as her eye can see. It would be ridiculous, this display ostentatious even for a planet of Arkanis's wealth, if it were not so dangerous.

Her client never mentions who she represented, but it is not difficult to figure out. Jyn has planned enough ambushes to recognize what she's brought. The only targets on Arkanis are symbols of the Empire.

The negotiations confirm her suspicions. A third of her clients pay, while the others divide into those who bargain (but eventually cough up) and those who steal. Rebels usually pay; their sources of weaponry this deep in Imperial-held territory are too few and far between to risk destroying one. Her client, who calls herself Ashla, pays.

She restocks with haste after delivering her cargo, and the woman running the workshop follows her gaze outside.

"It's not usually so... decorative," she says, "but the Flight Academy's graduation ceremony is today."

Jyn murmurs something unintelligible, but the woman seems only amused. Is this the event the rebels were preparing for? Surely not. To buy weapons so late, to set up traps within a few hours, would be impossible in a city so well guarded. She needs to leave.

The route she took to arrive is now crowded with humans and humanoids, and Jyn's unease grows. A quick glance up confirms it: air traffic has ground to a halt, but the buildings are teeming. Explosions here will injure hundreds. No one involved will be spared the crowd's judgment, if caught.

"Move," she mutters, trying to cut her way through. She nudges past two men crying with what looks like joy. There are guards closer to the street; she skirts around them. Above her head, TIE-fighters swoop through the streets, barely above reach of the buildings.

Then it happens. A far larger ship descends into view. In seconds, the crowd fall into stillness. She curses, reining in the impulse to run, but keeps moving further away. The faces around her seem stunned; this must not have been part of the planned celebration. Even the Imperial guards fidget; in the silence, she hears one muttering inside his helmet.

There's a flicker as it hovers in place, shielding battered by the rising wind. She looks over her shoulder long enough to blink.

A transport detaches from the bottom of the ship and sails smoothly towards a tall platform that Jyn had assumed would be for the graduates. She is only a hundred feet away, near the cordon that prevents the crowd from getting close.

When the door hisses open, ice plunges down her spine. No. Bantha spit. _Emperor's death_. Her luck could not be this awful. The rebels could not be this bold (though of course they would be) to target a Moff, much less the Moff of the Arkanis sector. To destroy a symbol is one thing; an Imperial officer of this ranking another. Between the Imperial hammer and the encroaching Hutts, the Rebellion would not be able to stand.

Jyn knows the shipment of weapons she bought. They would not be enough. She wonders how long the rebels have actually prepared. She wonders how many people the explosions will kill.

What Jyn does not know is this:

Above her head, from a building overlooking the transport's descent, Cassian Andor is sliding his blaster into sniper configuration and taking aim between Moff Alexander Julstan's eyes.

\--

TBC


	2. Arkanis

He wakes up ten days after Scarif. He is lucky to wake up at all.

He into his abdomen, a medical droid tells him in a cool, flat voice, and his heart stopped from the loss of blood in circulation. They pumped so much fluid into his veins, on the way to Alderaan, that his blood was nearly salt water.

 _You came out on the last shipment before its destruction,_ the droid finishes. _Your personal belongings are in the bag by your bed. I trust you feel well informed and wish you a good evening._

Alderaan is gone. The planet-killer, the _Death Star_ , claimed his men and his allies along with billions of other lives. There's no corresponding victory to show for the loss.

Cassian, too weak to lift a hand, says nothing when the droid leaves. He does not notice it go; he does not notice the door shut; he does not notice Bodhi on the other side of his bed, blinking blearily as he wakes from sleep. Nothing seems quite real. Cassian would wonder if he were still asleep, but his nightmares have always been replayed memories, with someone dead at his feet. There are no metaphors in his dreams.

He rolls his head with effort to escape his thoughts, and when he looks to his right, everything goes sharp and painful.

Bodhi holds a dangling necklace of clear crystal. It doesn't belong to him.

"Jyn," he rasps. He is not certain he makes any sound at all, but Bodhi seems to understand, from the way his face crumples with unburied regret.

"Jyn?" Cassian asks again, and Bodhi shakes his head. There are scars across his neck, Cassian notes distantly, as if Bodhi had not received bacta, but the only thing in focus is the way Jyn's necklace swings.

The last thing he had seen on Scarif was sunlight refracting from that kyber crystal, a glimpse of light and hope and Jyn's face, so beautifully alive, like one good deed in all the darkness. He had been awash in fulfillment even as his knees gave out. They'd been twined together, her arms like an anchor, pressed so very close. There is no good reason for his survival and not hers, unless--

If her necklace is here, and she is not, then--

Then she is not, and had time to choose to pass her necklace on before she faced her doom. A second gift, alongside his survival, at the expense of hers.

Maybe it is a nightmare after all.

Somewhere behind his sternum, there is a scream building. It tries to tear through his throat on the way out and ravage the entire room.

Instead, he falls into unconsciousness. He dreams of light, clean and blinding, swallowing her whole.

\--

There is life before Jyn, and life after.

Jyn leaves an indelible mark he cannot scrub away. For a time, on Scarif and perhaps before, the thought of her safety weighed on her mind as heavy as the Rebellion. There had been nothing but reaching up the next ridge on the data vault, every inch of him bruised and battered, to try and find her again.

The world seems darker in her wake. The fight will always be worth it, no matter how heavy it lies on his shoulders. His life, not so much. Not for hers.

And she had died, in the end, not for the Rebellion's cog in the machine, but for _him_. Part of him aches every time he remembers this.

But the important part is that there _is_ an after.

(He dreams many times, in the months that follow, of the Death Star's light turning her into stardust, and the dreams always end the same way.

He opens his eyes in darkness and continues with his mission.)

\--

Jyn's crystal digs into his skin, right at the center of his sternum.

Cassian does not move. He has Moff Alexander Julstan's face in his cross-hairs, and there it will remain until he fires.

Soon. Not yet.

He kneels in a space carved out of the building's wall, aiming through a window two hand-widths in length. Through the scope, Julstan turns to watch TIE fighters whirling in aerial maneuvers. Wonder, incongruous with his character, crosses his face. Julstan keeps slaves, but he values his son, a student at the Flight Academy. A rebel spy had mentioned the graduation off-hand. It had not taken much prodding to convince Julstan to make a grand appearance.

_Hold..._

Electricity zips through the platform Julstan stands on, and his shield wavers.

 _Now_.

He shoots.

Julstan falls, his head a burned shell. There is no rush of satisfaction, but it's done.

His weapon swings in the surge of adrenaline, and for an instant, his scope travels through the crowd of faces. Most still crane their necks, enthralled by the fireworks display. One, though, one parts the crowd with purpose, nearly shoving through people now. This one comprehends. The figure turns once, looking up at the buildings in his direction.

Cassian's heart stutters at her face. _Jyn._

No. Another mirage, just like on Hoth, just like on Tattooine. A second glance and she will have vanished like mist.

He blinks hard. The figure is still there, shouldering past a crowd only now falling still. Her head bows low, a tattered scarf wrapped around her neck, and he cannot see her face. It cannot be Jyn, he reminds himself. She's dead. He does not believe in miracles.

It takes thirty seconds to disassemble his blaster. By the time he reaches the ground, stormtroopers have streamed into the square, penning people in from all sides.

He activates his sonic blockers when he steps into the crowd, joining the frenetic energy and panic. The stormtroopers are herding people into separate sections, easier to comb through. They are not gentle about it.

"Move!" one barks into his ear. Cassian staggers back, letting his face fall slack with terror, until the stormtrooper turns to his next victim. What the guard will remember is fear, no different from the fear on anyone else's face. After a moment, he melts deeper into the throng of people, intent on returning to his allies.

 _Now_.

Their final weapon activates with a ear-splitting whine, throwing the gathering into further chaos. Stormtroopers clutch at their heads. The crowd seems to shudder like a single sentient being, as they stop fighting, and try to block out the pulse of noise. The HoloNet screens throughout the city stutter to a close as communication systems fall.

Cassian slips away.

\--

It takes her an hour to reach her destination, felled stormtroopers in her wake. The world screams in its unnatural silence. Something warm and sticky runs from her right ear--blood, she knows, once she dabs her finger to it. Nothing bacta will not fix, but her supply is out.

She scrubs the blood off with a dirty finger and begins to walk towards the city's disreputable workshops again. She does her best not to sway, and bares her teeth whenever someone glances in her direction. Her wits, her bravado, will take the place of hearing. _Pull yourself together. You've been through worse._

Hidden eyes burn into her back from every direction. It was subdued when she first visited, illegal operations going underground for the Flight Academy graduation. Now the rows of shops are desolate, stalls empty, with a general sense of abandonment. It's a good illusion. Jyn hasn't been on Arkanis long enough to find its weak spot.

A shadow falls beside hers. She spins, hand going to her blaster, and drawing it even as she recognizes the person's face.

It's the rebel, Jyn's last client. She calls herself Ashla, and all four of Ashla's eyes watch her with concern.

 _You're hurt_ , she thinks Ashla says. Or maybe it's, _you're her_ , which would be another problem in itself.

Jyn hesitates. Her lips tighten with the effort not to pull back in a snarl. _There is no weakness in any inch of me._

"Thanks for the warning, by the way," she hisses, palm ghosting to her blaster.

 _Sorry_ , she reads off Ashla's lips. She actually looks contrite, and says something else that also looks contrite, that Jyn can't follow.

Jyn's heart sinks, watching her. There is no practical way to hide that she cannot hear, and the choice lies right here. She could trust the safety of credits and exchanges, as far as she trusts anyone on this planet, or she could work with someone who already upheld her end of the bargain.

"I wasn't prepared for your weapons," Jyn admits, and gestures to her ear.

Ashla's lips actually twitch. She opens her mouth to speak, then seems to remember Jyn's difficulties, and makes an elaborate gesture that would start a fight in Issor's pubs. Right there, in one of the few places on the planet she'd get shot for a drop of bacta, Ashla digs into one of the deep pockets of her vest and produces a small jar.

Bacta, Jyn realizes when she unscrews the lid. There's maybe enough to heal her ear if she scrapes along the jar's bottom, not enough for anything more, but it is too precious for an exchange out in the open.

Or maybe being seen is the point. The Rebellion takes care of its allies, Ashla's gesture means. They are foolish, but not treacherous.

If they wish to hold the system, which lies in the intersection of two major smuggling routes, it is not a bad strategy.

Jyn takes the jar and begins the journey back to her ship.

\--

Draven orders him off planet and out of the Arkanis system. There is a new target. There is _always_ a new target, some who fall to Cassian's lies, some to his blaster. The knowledge is reassuring. Ever since his third mission after Scarif, the targets have been easier, with more blood on their hands, and Cassian is grateful.

"Order received," he murmurs into the mouthpiece, where the process of encryption will begin.

His fingers rise to curl around the crystal at his throat. It is cool to touch, no matter how long it stays against his skin, and the feel of it has become oddly grounding. Maybe he holds onto it a little longer than usual. He does not think about it.

He grabs supplies off Ashla--the name _Brianna Sotar_ again, perhaps he should meet her this time--and walks through the streets as if he belongs when there are no stormtroopers about, and within the shadows when there are.

Cassian begins to wonder if leaving the city will prove an uncomplicated business until, as if summoned, he sees her again.

His eye catches on a small commotion within an alleyway thirty feet away, a flash of dull green. The brashness of open violence, in the face of discovery, is so unexpected that Cassian takes a moment to comprehend what he sees, and when he does, electricity jolts up his spine. Her tattered scarf flashes as she moves, her body a straight, efficient line. It's the same figure he sighted on the roof, and in the face of two stormtroopers, she acts like a dissenter.

Cassian is about to leave the fight be when it happens.

What gives her away is this:

She slams a truncheon across the stormtrooper's windpipe so hard he collapses to the ground and does not rise again. It is the simplest, most concrete confirmation there could be.

His breath hitches, and every muscle in Cassian's body locks up even before he sees her face. Disbelief wars with elation. It is impossible to mistake, from this far away. Her cheek has been broken and healed differently, her skin is lined with dirt, but she moves like every warm body is an enemy she has one chance to finish. It's her.

Jyn Erso.

She darts into the alleyway, unaware he is watching. Cassian follows before his mind catches up. He needs to move on. He needs to reach his ship. He needs to leave this planet while Imperial patrols have yet to close in, suspicious that Arkanis City has suddenly stopped transmitting.

He strides towards the alley.

She is half way through when he turns the corner. Her right shoulder moves stiffly, as though it were injured, and there's a blaster at her right hip, her truncheon strapped to her left. He wouldn't be surprised if, somewhere in the city, there are a dozen stormtroopers who have fallen to her wrath.

Her name sounds similar to variants in the Expansion Zone and along the Correlian trade route. It is a common enough name to risk.

"Jyn," he hisses, low, cutting through the city's noise.

He has spoken too softly. She keeps walking further away, deceptively fast.

He's not foolish enough to shout, and marches after her, muscles tense with the urge to sprint. His boots are loud against the concrete ground, but impossibly, she does not even bother to turn.

"Jyn," he says again, this time much louder. His voice is not much changed from two years ago. It should be recognizable.

Her head shifts -- she's looking at his shadow on the ground, he realizes -- but she does not look back.

She runs.

He reaches out a hand for her wrist, just one lunge away, but she turns the corner again.

"Hey, you!" Pain bursts across his left shoulder, and he's yanked to his knees without warning. Cassian grits his teeth, freezing his instinctual response to fight back, because there's the clattering of multiple pieces of armor behind him. Stormtroopers. Five or six -- six, he sees over his shoulder.

The world opens again. He hadn't realised how it narrowed around Jyn, but he feels the unyielding ground beneath his knees, the weight of a blaster against the nape of his neck. The choking stink of burning plas fills the air. His side stings as someone shoves him down, harsh and perfunctory, and grabs his blaster.

Jyn is gone, like she was never there.

He wonders, as his heart rate slows to normal, if this was a trap, and dismisses it again. Jyn would not--would never--she would not, at least, ever help the Empire. Even if she ran. Even if she ran from him, from the Rebellion, as she must have for one year or more.

"Papers," one of the stormtroopers snaps.

This, at least, he prepared for. "Right pocket."

The person beside him, who seems to be in charge, gives it a brief glance.

"Joreth Sward? You were an Admiral's aide?" His voice drips with disdain. "And you threw your lot in with this rabble."

"There's obviously been some kind of mistake--"

The world goes black.

\--

"Tell me what happened," he says, two days after he wakes up on Yavin IV. His back presses against a lumpy pillow. It is all that keeps him propped up.

Chirrut gazes past him. He sits cross-legged and relaxed, staff propped up across his knees. "You could look it up on your data banks. They're extensive, or so I hear."

Cassian already has. There was nothing, presumably because everyone who could give a proper report was unconscious, or dead.

"I want to hear it from you," Cassian deflects. It is also true, in a way.

Chirrut's face breaks into a brief huff of laughter. "Well said.But I think you already know what happened. Jyn had two paths. She chose the one that she thought was best. You were dying. She could wait." His smile fades. "The Death Star came and destroyed the Citadel after we broke atmosphere, just like it destroyed Jedha."

It's more straight-forward an answer than Cassian expected, but Chirrut speaks of the world as it is. His beliefs shine because he knows the mud and grit of cities destroyed, temples desecrated, guardians turned to assassins, not in spite of it.

"Why didn't you stop her?" Cassian asks numbly. "You liked her."

He waits for an answer about choice, and belief, and hope, but Chirrut surprises him again.

"To stop a hurricane takes time Baze didn't have, and he would have died if we delayed," Chirrut says, slow and heavy. He sighs. "I was also nearly unconscious. That didn't help."

Chirrut rises to leave. He moves slowly these days. The concussive force of the grenade nearly ended his life, and did knock his brain hard enough it bled. He is unsteady on his feet, if improving.

Cassian does not thank him. Chirrut does not pass on his sympathies.

Cassian tilts his chin up, away from the glint of Jyn's crystal. He hates the sight of the crystal and cannot bear to touch it, except when he cannot bear not to. "You should take it. It's kyber. You could put it to good use."

Chirrut's unseeing eyes meet his. Force of habit to turn toward the noise, perhaps, or to underline his message.

"But it doesn't belong to me," he says, with the faintest of smiles. "She gave it to you. I suppose she thought you were a worthy cause, Captain Andor."

\--

He stays two weeks in total on Arkanis, waiting as rebel after rebel is brought into the base. Hearing their screams prove a worthy test of his ability to deceive.

Ashla dies with defiance on her face and a cyanide pill crushed between her teeth. She is the last they find. They capture no one else.

He does not face enhanced interrogation. Joreth Sward's identity was never burned; he merely fell into bad straits, and then vanished, after Imperial Admiral Grandreef's death. The peacekeepers consider him a rabble-rouser. He thumbs the tiny pill that could hold escape, at night, at times, but he does not use it.

On the third week, he is transported off-planet.

What Cassian does not know is this:

There is a rescue planned. Jyn hears of it.

\--

TBC


	3. Kessel Run

The Death Star fires, a graceful stream of green that vaporizes the antenna above her head and splits the ocean into halves.

Jyn has braced herself for death when she sees the TIE-fighter. She raises Cassian's blaster, searching the skies for something else to shoot. Her fire power isn't enough to destroy the vessel. But maybe there's some other way to disable it, so there's less starfighter preying on the Empire's behalf.

Nothing. The atmosphere stays empty, though explosions thunder from far below. No tight space to lure a fighter through, no scratches on the ship that might signal the weakness. There is no cover, no moving forwards, no moving back. Just the horizon turning black with a distant, overwhelming rumble as the earth shatters.

The TIE-fighter hovers at the edge of the platform.

This is the end. The moment stretches, tight and heavy and pulling at her nerves until they threaten to snap. Jyn refuses to close her eyes. She will face her fate with eyes open. She will look death in the face.

Her life does not matter. The plans have beamed into the waiting galaxy. Cassian and the ship are long gone from atmo, carrying Bodhi and Baze and Chirrut somewhere safer. It's worth it, this fight, every step that led to her being here, so long as her friends are safe, and the galaxy has hope. Her life for the Death Star's existence.

It means she will die alone and far from home -- home, which is not a planet, but the people leaving in a ship at faster-than-light speed. Jyn never expected otherwise. She lived alone, and she'll die alone. At least the Man in White's crumpled body will disappear with her.

The TIE-fighter draws closer. She glares back defiantly. She does not fear death.

She is still glaring when the cockpit's hatch hisses open.

"Are you getting in or not?" the Imperial pilot demands.

\--

She watches Ashla's death along with every other sentient in the city. It is not pleasant.

Communications through Arkanis City returned two weeks ago, and in its wake came a stream of Imperial warships, looming above the city. She sees them whenever she looks up, a silent threat against a planet that has always belonged to the Empire. Its citizens watch, the silence of terrified complicity, sobs held back and faces empty as anyone convenient is seized from home. Anyone inconvenient, too.

If Arkanis isn't safe, nothing is. A Moff fell to the Rebellion on an Imperial-held world, and the Empire trapped a faithful planet with faithful citizens in response. Most sentients have never been safe. Now humans and near-humans know it also.

Each rebel's death was splashed across various HoloNet screens, across the planet certainly, across the sector perhaps. Each one died in fear, bravery wiped out by either torment or edited footage.

Ashla laughs when she dies, and for that, the HoloNet blinks into silence. The Empire does not want to spread the image of defiance. She only sees it because she is on Arkanis still; flying out is too dangerous.

She did not know Ashla well enough for grief, and the Empire only had her for one day, too brief for fear. In the wake of Ashla's death, she burns with cold anger, old, and never buried. The memory of Alderaan's destruction, taking everything she cared for, never stays buried for long. It rises like the tide.

Her hand twitches, the impulse to reach for her mother's kyber necklace not quite gone. There is nothing but empty air.

Her hearing returned with the warships, bacta working its magic, and for that she owes Ashla a debt. She will not forget it.

\--

Three days after Ashla's death, a Mandalorian sets her blaster to stun and wedges it into center of Jyn's back. She is, Jyn is certain almost at once, a member of the Rebellion. The woman's grief over Ashla’s name and the mere thought of leaving her behind gives it away.

She thinks of each rebel she had allowed passage on her ship, how there was meaning in that side. She never forgot, even if Cassian was dead, and she itches to burn off her anger.

"She found me after Julstan's death and saved me. The next time I saw her, it was her death. If you're on her side," she says, "I want to help."

The woman says, " _Really._ "

A human male accompanies her. His voice is newly settled into adulthood after it cracked in adolescence, but with strange certainty that reminds Jyn of Chirrut. He sounds as human as the woman, but not Mandalorian. "I believe her. She didn't sell Ashla out."

There is a brief pause. Jyn almost hears a silent battle of wills from behind her back, communication so well-worn it passes through the woman's helmet without sound. The arm against her back grows tense, though the blaster does not waver so much as half an inch. No chance to take advantage of anything.

The blaster leaves her back. She turns.

The man is very young, certainly younger than Jyn, hair a dark shade of blue, scars slanting along his cheek. A gray hilt of some kind hangs from his hip. The woman flips up her helmet with her free hand to reveal pink-dyed hair and a face that smiles quickly and taunts easily, Mandalorian to the core. Right now, her face creases with displeasure.

"Hera's not going to like this," she says grumpily, tone much too relaxed for a rebel mission in a planet crawling with Imperials. She has done this many times before, or never before. Jyn is certain it is the former.

"We'll need all the help we can get, Sabine," the man retorts. "And you're kidding, right? Hera will love this. She's always trying to inspire people to the cause."

The woman scoffs but does not contradict him.

"Brianna," the man says, "how would you feel about stealing a prisoner vessel?"

She leaves her ship with the rebels and her droid with the promise of her return.

\--

Peacekeepers herd them through the icy, drenching rain to a prison ship bound for the mines of Kessel. Someone a few feet away stumbles, and cries out in agony as he's wrenched up again. His beard trails to his knees, gray over his wrinkled skin.

Cassian fixes his gaze forwards to hide how he scans the roofs. There will be no rescue attempt; he is certain, he _hopes_ , cooler heads will prevail. He cannot listen to more screams. He has jerked awake every night with their memory ringing in his ears--on the nights he does not dream of Jyn, small and determined on Scarif, watching his ship leave.

Jyn. Alive. The question of how she survived pales against the fact that she did. Where has she been? Why, he wonders too, did she never return to the Rebellion? To hi--

She had found people she cared for, and Cassian did not think those were easy to give up. Even now, with no resources to reprogram, he fiddles with K-2SO's backups and wracks his mind for ways to bring his friend back. Even now, seeing the ghost of her face, he had run through the crowd to find her.

Perhaps he had misjudged her. Perhaps he misjudged himself. In the alley ways of Arkanis, it had not been the Empire she tried to leave in her wake, but him.

If she managed to escape. She had moved as if injured and, unwillingly, he pictures her facing another set of stormtroopers, one hand clutching a painful shoulder. She would keep fighting until she fell. The crystal weighs heavy around his neck, the line tight and choking.

He wrenches his thoughts back to the present. He has wasted enough time thinking in circles, this past week on Arkanis. There will be no rescue. He needs to find a way out.

Cassian memorizes the route he is forced to take through the ship, and breathes through its takeoff. He is held in a cell with five other prisoners, hands cuffed, feet bound, a single camera running in one corner, pressure-sensing bars that do not burn or shock on contact. Corridor V5, cell 6. It is sufficient for a ship of human prisoners. The loss of a few lives, if there is an altercation, would have little impact on the mines.

Grimly, Cassian waits. He plans. He does not want to think of anything else.

\--

They are, the green-skinned Twi'lek says as their ship leaves atmo, especially interested in a human called Joreth Sward. She does not offer a holo of his appearance. His face must valuable information in some way or another, which means the search will be left to others, not a smuggler who joined on a whim.

"We'll secure the ship first in their first stop out of hyperspace," the Twi'lek says, "and worry later about the prisoners. We have a ship waiting to jam any signals from their storage vessel. Any questions?"

"Yes," Jyn says loudly. "Just how many of us are going to secure the ship?" The very small number of very determined-looking rebels seems far short of what is needed.

The Twi'lek grins. "We've faced worse odds, and it's too late for you to back out now."

"Much worse odds," the man from before agrees. "In a temple dedicated to the Sith with kriffing Darth Vader attacking. In a hanger with Darth Vader attacking. Just... Vader."

The woman scoffs.

They're a team. Watching their banter makes something inside Jyn scrape painfully, the hard stones of yearning and loss too close to the surface. She clenches her fists and drags the feeling down.

Admitting that she _was_ helping the Rebellion has done it. There was one face of this iteration of the Rebellion, this Alliance, and she could never forget him, cannot feel nothing when she pictures his face. Coming to Arkanis opened the door to memory. Now she cannot close it. She should not have come, but she thinks of Cassian and Bodhi, the rest of Rogue One, and her search for regret comes up empty.

She wonders who this Joreth Sward might be.

"A student to someone very important to us," the man says, voice hushed. "The ship's a nice bonus too."

It does not matter. She won't be allowed to see his face, or, by the extension, the man.

\--

It's four hours into the flight that emergency flurolights wash every room red. Most Stormtroopers, he had seen on the way in, wait on the decks, guarding against an invasion from pirates. The prisoners are not a threat. The single Stormtrooper standing guard over their line of cells rushes out as klaxon sounds.

_Slaver pirates. We are being boarded. All hands report to deck 13. All hands report to deck 13._

Cassian reaches into the false bottoms of his boot.

\--

Jyn tugs on the stormtrooper's armor when she stuns the first lot they pass. The thud of bodies hitting the ground is as satisfying as she anticipated.

"Watch where you're aiming," she calls to her accomplices. One of them, an astromech Hera affectionately calls Chopper, already peeled off to slice the records of prisoners and to tap into the various video feeds. She tugs the helmet on last.

Sabine gives her a thumbs up. Her blaster jerks up; a bolt sings past Jyn's shoulder and thuds into another stormtrooper's chest.

"Aren't you a little short?" she asks.

Jyn ignores her. There's a faint scorch mark on her right shoulder pad. She points to it as identification, and both Ezra and Sabine nod. Ezra's chestpiece has scuff mark to the right, while Sabine's helmet has sprouted a tiny black flower at the back of the headpiece. It would look like a scratch, if Jyn hadn't seen Sabine bring out a vibroblade and draw out the lines. All stormtrooper uniforms are plain white, but none are without imperfections. Theirs are not unusual.

Somewhere in the fighting, they separate. Jyn moves through corridors R to X which, according to the crew's droid, has the fewest stormtroopers. Erza takes the corridors with the most, moving with a strange grace that, again, reminds her of Chirrut.

_Five more in corridor Vee_

"Thanks, Chopper," Jyn murmurs. She brings a truncheon out along with her blaster; there are too many corners for someone to hide behind, waiting to be close enough to wrest away her firearm. Her thighs burn from exertion.

Klaxons ring in the distance, followed by red floodlights that blind as they flash.

She ducks behind one of the handy corners and picks off each stormtrooper as he or she enters her line of vision. Four shots, four bodies dropping to the ground. The last one is cannier than the others, takes a look ahead, and immediately doubles back. Her bolts glance off the ground beneath his or her feet in the retreat.

She acted too soon. She wants to hold her ground and fire, not follow into a trap. _Kriff._

Waiting a moment to ensure there's no returning fire, Jyn slips from out of her hiding spot. There is no sound from around the corridor, but she presses close to the wall just in case.

"Which corridor?" she asks Chopper.

There is a minute before Chopper responds.

_Corridor V5_

He sounds extremely put out for a being that communicates in whistles. Jyn can't help it; she thinks of Kaytoo. Her mouth twitches.

The stormtrooper is scrambling for one of the holding pens when Jyn arrives, and goes down, rather anticlimactically, with two shots in the back from the other side of the corridor. His, or her, blaster drops to the ground without even being used.

"Huh," she says, tucking her truncheon back into its holster.

Her eyes lift to the holding pen. It becomes clear in an instant why the stormtrooper had been distracted. One of the prisoners is free of his armcuffs and leg chains. One hand holds a palmful of lockpicks; the other wraps around what must have been the Stormtrooper's auxiliary sidearm. He points it between her eyes.

Her heart stops. She nearly drops her weapon.

"Open the door," Cassian Andor says.

It's not--

She squeezes her eyes shut, one, two, three, and opens them again. He is still there, impatience joining menace on his face. _Cassian_. How--

A plasma bolt scorches the ground by her feet in warning. She lowers her blaster, unable to tear her eyes from the impossibility of his face. The face is bruised on one side, a scar scratches across his left cheek, but it is _his_.

"Open. The. Door."

Jyn tries to speak. Her tongue tastes dry and thick, too clumsy to form words. Her body knows; her body works on autopilot, pulling out the identity chip from her stormtrooper armor, rifling through the fallen stormtrooper's clothing to find his, and inserting them into the waiting identifiers by the cell door. She presses release and has to remind herself to breathe.

Cassian keeps his blaster fixed on her head as he steps out. He is, probably, going to shoot her. She should care. She does care. She needs to--she reaches for her helmet because she needs to _see him_. She needs to say-- needs to know if he's real--

_...are you listening to me? Three more incoming!_

"Kriff," she hisses under her breath. "Stormtroopers." His eyes widen at the sound of her voice. She is too busy stalking towards the doorway to notice. Her mind feels fuzzy and cold, crystal clear at the same time. _Cassian, Cassian, Cassian_.

The sleek sound of blaster fire rings through the corridors.

She gets the first stormtrooper to turn the corner on the leg, the second on the center of the forehead. A blaster bolt from behind her takes out the third.

Cassian leans against the doorway, eyes narrowed and shoulders stiff and heavy. He watches her like he does not comprehend, and is afraid to. His blaster is still raised. He has not fired yet. "Who are you?"

"I--" Jyn swallows hard. Her mouth is dry like Jedha's desert. She needs to push the words out. Cassian cannot see her face, cannot see the struggle between elation and disbelief, she needs to _voice_ it.

" _Joreth_!" Sabine's voice echoes down the corridor with such whip-like sharpness they both turn to look. She's sprinting, helmet off, blasters out. "Brianna! I see you met Joreth. Brianna, Joreth, Joreth, Brianna. We need to go. _Pirates_."

"Our distraction," Jyn asks.

"The false alarm and jamming the distress signal seemed like a good idea until they _actually turned up_ ," Sabine says agreeably. "Now's the best time to get out. Move, both of you."

Like a switch, Cassian's focus moves outwards. He stumbles a little when shifting to a run, but they move.

\--

Leaving the prisoner vessel is easier than entering, which Jyn finds absurd. Pirates have pinned down the majority of Stormtroopers. Blaster bolts and the occasional automatic rifle fill the air with red and smoke. They happen to be half the ship away from where Hera waits to take them away, aboard the ship that was jamming the prisoner vessel's signal.

Cassian keeps looking in her direction. She doesn't remember such easy distraction. For her part, she scouts ahead and raises her fingers behind her back in warning whenever someone approaches. Two stormtroopers. Four. One astromech droid, wheeling away from a staccato of laser blasts and bleeping with unhappy urgency.

When the ship is about to leave, the Spectres do not board.

"The general has a job for you, Joreth," Hera says, calm and composed. There is a streak of blood along her blaster that belongs to a human, or many humans, like she's gave up on firing and used it to bludgeon someone unconscious. " _Our_ job is here."

"There are a lot of enemies," Jyn points out.

Hera smiles. "We'll make sure they know who their enemy is. Not us, of course."

In the chaos, their ship pulls away.

When the prisoner vessel and pirate ship are out of sight (they are both too close to attempt a hyperspace jump, no matter who the pilot is, barred off from the back of the ship where Jyn and Cassian stand) she turns to him.

Cassian holds himself tall though he must hurt. A line of bruising disappears under the collar of his shift, and his left trouser leg is stained with dark blood. He stares at her. His expression is difficult to read. Something heavier than hope, something tighter than exhaustion.

"Brianna Sotar?" Cassian asks, slow, like he does not quite believe it.

She nods, but it's too much a lie. She raises both hands to tug the helmet off her head. Their eyes meet, and her muscles lock like a current runs through each fibre.

The light is harsher, clearer, without a plastiglass shield, and somehow, Cassian's expression is easier to read too. He closes his eyes, blinks, and fixes on her face when he opens them again. His lips parts, silent, wordless. Everything collapses down in the next instant, and disbelief changes into relief.

"Jyn," he breathes, like there is a world bound in that single word. Two steps bring them face to face, close enough to touch.

Her helmet clatters onto the floor. She does not care. All she can focus on is Cassian's arms wrapping around her. She clings so tightly it must hurt, but she cannot let go, and he does not try to move. She rests her face against his chest. He buries his head into the crook of her neck.

Her ribs creak in protest at the strength of his grip, and something sharp digs against her throat. She does not care.

There is the sound of his shuddering breaths, the scratch of his hair against her neck, his fingers splaying out at the center of her back. There is the brush of his gasps against her shoulder. There is one small, still moment in the chaos.

Her heartbeat roars in her ears, drowning out all noise.

There is only this. There is only him.

\--

TBC


	4. An Interlude

He does not bring Jyn's necklace on his first mission after Scarif.

The short recruiting trip is delayed by flooding on the planet's biggest continent. The disaster brings a flurry of activity, a nexus of connections to businesses across the galaxy as friends and family send back aid, and he finds more informants to join the warriors who had volunteered. Maybe hates himself a little, using pain and loss as a lever, but it's a familiar feeling. He's done worse. (He's done better, he thinks once, around the time he sees a woman with Jyn's face and follows her, only for a second glance to reveal it was not Jyn at all.) Three days stretches to a month before he sets foot back onto a Rebellion base.

There, he learns Chirrut has stayed after all to guide Skywalker in the arts of prayers, philosophy, and cryptic messages, Baze has begun transforming ordinary blasters into something deadlier, and Bodhi has a gaggle of new recruits of his own.

"They were like me," Bodhi explains, hesitant. Imperials, he means. Defectors.

Cassian considers him. The burns across Bodhi's face have healed into scars, but there is as much uncertainty in his eyes as ever, a quiver to his voice.

"People who opened their eyes," Cassian says, and Bodhi nods, relief crossing his face.

"They came to _us_ ," Bodhi says. "I, we didn't, they didn't need to be _kidnapped_. They volunteered. They _volunteered_."

"Like you," Cassian says , because Bodhi needs, even now, to hear it too.

Cassian finds all this easier to believe than the fact General Draven, who probably dreams of intelligence missions only marginally more than he does of ways they could be betrayed, accepted the volunteers at all. Half the Rebellion is formed of defectors, just never so many who came without careful recruitment. But in the wake of Yavin IV, the combined miracles of a Jedi among their ranks and a decisive victory, perhaps even General Draven is different.

Luke Skywalker brought hope to a Rebellion that had little left to spare. The Death Star's destruction had been Cassian's first moment of peace, after Scarif. The bittersweet victory was the first time he thought about Jyn and felt something other than regret, frustration, or guilt.

"Do you think," Bodhi starts, watching the recruits. They step aside to let a Togruta stomp past, a snarl on her lips. "Do you think they will stay?"

He shrugs. "You would know better than me."

Bodhi hesitates, longer this time. Cassian follows his stare. There is a brown-haired woman sorting through weapons on the other end of the hanger. Her height and efficiency are such that he's reminded sharply of Jyn.

Bodhi is watching him.

"Do you think," Bodhi says slowly, "that Jyn would have stayed?"

The change in topic jerks Cassian back to the present. He bites down on surprise with discipline from a lifetime of training.

It's not something he considered, in the days he first woke, the world gray and hollow and lit with only one driving purpose, in a way he had not appreciated until Jyn Erso reminded him of what else it could be. He considers it now, imagines her abandoning the Rebellion, thinks of her face alight in Yavin IV's hanger, and cannot picture her walking away. She had found a purpose, and it is not easy to give one up. She had found people she cared for, and those are not easy to give up either.

"Yes," he decides. "She believed in this."

She would have been here, and her absence feels like something hollowed out part of the world.

\--

It is not so much a decision to let go as an pressing necessity. Cassian begins to cough, hacking, shuddering coughs that feel like his lungs are rattling within his rib cage. He does not plan to release her, but Jyn makes the decision for him, arms sliding away and pushing. She is too far away; panic rises, a momentary blankness of thought, and recedes in the same instant.

"What exactly did they do?" she asks. She draws back until her face comes into focus, eyes flicking down his body. Sweat makes the thin fabric of both his shirts cling to skin.

He shakes his head. "Very little. No pressing injuries, though I could have done with more food."

Minimal shelter against Arkanis's freezing downpour and biting wind; very little food; a few sips of water each day. He's been without food for longer, across various environments hostile to humans, but his stomach gnaws with the sharpness beyond hunger, the dizziness beyond thirst.

"Very little," Jyn repeats. Her gaze drops to where he knows bruises disappear under his collar. "I'd hate to see what they did to people they cared about."

He presses his hand against his chest to control when pain catches, and staggers a little. His legs feel overburdened, his knees about to collapse; adrenaline and sheer determination are no longer enough. Even so, one thought above all clamors for attention.

"Where have you been?" he murmurs. It is not, he knows, the best time to ask. His self-control, and probably rational thinking, has been worn thin by two weeks of wondering, by exposure and cold.

Her mouth tightens, the corners of her eyes pulling back with strain.

"Lets talk about that later," she mutters.

His lightheadedness returns with a vengeance, and he nods. As Jyn turns to survey the cargo hold, Cassian forces his body to move so he can collapse onto a knee-high storage container. The air bites with cold, and his entire body shivers.

When he looks up, there's something unreal about Jyn, standing clad in stormtrooper armor, eyes a little dazed, and he takes too long to look away. Part of him wonders if he's still asleep. He never dreams of anything this pleasant, would have said it was too impossible: Jyn, alive, stealing onto an Imperial prison vessel with the leaders of Ghost Base to save him.

The swell of pain when he breathes disabuses him of this notion.

"Try those," he starts, between another fit of coughs, but she's already prying open one of the containers stamped with Alderaan's planetary sigil, like she knows her way around Rebellion symbols and their meanings.

Alderaan, for sanctuary, for the substance and gift of life. There is everything required to recuperate and become as close to whole again as a Rebellion fighter ever quite manages: bacta, food palatable to most species, water for humans, and tents for shelter.

If something shifts at the sight of Jyn, bending to grab something from within the box, it is his exhaustion speaking.

\--

The need for food and water blots out the rest of the galaxy, if only for an instant. He downs it all like air.

The back of his mind clamors when he comes back to himself; hunger has affected his thinking. He makes himself slow down, chewing slowly, drinking with care. As rational thought returns, Jyn's gaze begins to burn, a different sort of hunger igniting beneath his skin at the intensity of her gaze. She had been good, he remembers, at masking her emotions, but she does not bother now.

Jyn had tugged off the pieces of stormtrooper armor and slammed them aside with more force than necessary. She looks smaller without it, but it's the uncertainty on her face that stills his thoughts. She sits on a crate, close enough he could reach out and touch her knee, and stares.

"Let me check you over," Jyn says eventually. Her sentence lilts up at the end like a half question. He hesitates, and she presses, with a touch more sharpness, " _Cassian_. We didn't rescue you for you to die of some raging infection."

Her voice is sure, her face is not, and the edges of his vision blur with exhaustion even with food and water. She would be more efficient than him. Maybe needs it just as much.

As an answer, he shrugs off his outer shirt.

She sits beside him, close enough he can pick out the freckles on her cheek and the sweat beading her temples, and starts from the top.

Her hands push against the bones of his skull. A bruise throbs behind his ear, from where a stormtrooper smashed a blaster as warning, but it is old. She moves down his cheeks next, firm pressure against his cheekbones, his jaw, as she checks for fractures. He's certain there are none. Her thumb whispers against the side of his mouth; an accident, he decides, an unintended touch as her hands leave his face, and he should be far too tired to want more, but he does.

Her fingers trail down further, too firm for gentleness, but still a strange comfort. He did not have broken ribs before boarding the prisoner vessel, but did not have time to check again after the mad scramble against his stormtrooper guard, just before Jyn had found him. His ribs ache against the pressure of her hand, warm through the thin fabric of his undershirt. How hot would her touch be if there were nothing all between her skin and his? Just the thought of it makes his head spin. He turns his head away to cough, but there's none of the sharpness of rib fractures.

She pauses when she reaches the end of his rib cage. One hand presses, a light butterfly touch across his abdomen that makes his muscles go taut. The other skims up, across his chest, pausing an instant while his heart thumps madly, and traces the necklace disappearing under the shirt.

Her fingers tremble. The kyber crystal is a point of coolness, dragging across his feverish skin as she fishes it out. He knows the moment she registers what it is, feels as much as hears her breath catch.

She freezes, statue-still save for how her shoulders begin to shake. Her fingers close around the kyber crystal, pressing so hard the fingertips turn white. The chain tugs around his throat. It would cut off his stuttering breathing, if he were able to breathe.

He finds the strength to watch her face, each individual eyelash as she blinks.

Her lips part; he imagines he feels each puff of air against his cheek, but she does not say a thing. Her brows furrow, then smooth, and her chin wobbles just a touch. Uncertainty, he thinks; some other strong emotion he should be able to interpret, but cannot. When she looks up to meet his gaze, her eyes shine like stars in darkness.

His mouth goes dry.

They don't speak.

His hand rises of its own violation. He is not certain if he wants to touch her cheek, or close his hand around hers, or just feel the brush of her skin, the reality of her existence.

He touches nothing but air. His movement seems to wake her. A deep, shuddering breath and she leans back again, breaking the spell; he only realizes then how close their faces had been. The crystal drops back against the fabric of his shirt.

Jyn looks away, back to where her other hand had lingered, and pushes against bruises in her stomach. Her touch had been warm before; now each finger burns.

"Relax," she whispers.

She's right. He swallows and tries to control how his muscles twitch beneath her touch, then loosen into languid relaxation against his will. She presses with more force than necessary, and he shakes his head when she asks if there's pain.

Her eyes drop to the crusted blood on his trouser leg, and she kneels on the floor to pull it up. They both see the laceration on his calf, edges still red and weeping. The distance, the tension shattering, is a strange, aching relief.

"I wasn't tortured, Jyn," he says, voice low, and she flinches. "Not more than any other citizen."

He doesn't need to remind her not to bother with the bruises; they're superficial. She smooths a bacta patch over his laceration, and shoots antibiotics into his arm.

He blinks up at her. Exhaustion claws again at the corners of his mind; his vision goes blurry every time he blinks or loses focus. The painkillers might have had a sedative effect. Perhaps the last two weeks have finally caught up to him, because his eyelids droop, impossibly heavy. Part of him fights the vulnerability sleep would present; a second, the fear that this is a dream, and will vanish when he wakes.

The absurd reality is that, one year and too many questions later, he still trusts her enough to sink into dreams.

He thinks he feels her touch on his cheek before he drifts to sleep.

\--

Jyn falls into a dream that is memory. As usual, she does not like it.

She dreams of the flight off Scarif, her blaster heavy at her hip as she considers whether to kill the pilot that saved her life. He's an Imperial, AV-547, even if he watches Scarif's collapse with something like grief, something like anger. He's an Imperial who addressed her as _ma'am_ , eyes flicking over the remains of her Deathtrooper uniform, who will realize soon enough that she is no friend to the Empire.

As they leave atmo, the shapes of Star Destroyers and TIE fighters emerge from the darkness, drifting within the shattered remains of battle stations and X-Wings. Not far away, the frozen corpse of a pilot wheels aimlessly. Jyn draws in a sharp breath. She can pilot, but not though this, not well enough to escape in this clumsy wreck of a ship.

"I didn't think the rebels had this kind of firepower," the pilot says. His voice is tight but his hands sure, guiding the ship into the cluster of vessels overhead.

Jyn laughs, a harsh rasp of a sound, and he glances back at her. Maybe it's recklessness, now that there is only her life to be accountable for, that makes her candid.

"They don't," she tells him. "It wasn't the Rebellion that destroyed us."

He hesitates, and that is enough to make her hesitate too. Imperials, Saw Gerrera has taught, and she has reminded herself over and over, do not hesitate. Do not mistake their incompetence for regret; shoot first. But Bodhi's face looms. _Galen told me I could make a difference._

"We wouldn't," he insists after a beat, already catching her implication. "None of us were given the order to evacuate. It would be -- be -- be a _waste_." He understands that much, at least: the Empire measures actions in effect and efficiency, not morality.

She could kill him; she made her peace with death, and there are worse ways to die than an instant of searing heat.

 _Bodhi_ , she thinks again. And, underneath, the thought that she wants to live. She has stared death too often to fear it, but she wants it to mean something, and she wants to _live_ to see those she cares about again.

"Do you think the rebels could build _that_?" She gestures where the Death Star looms. Her tongue nearly trips; she has held many identities, but few where she pretended to be the opposite of what she was. "Either they're rabble, or they're ready to attack Coruscant within the day. The Empire destroyed Scarif because they thought -- " _Mass murder,_ she thinks, but does not say "-- death was worth it to bring peace. I knew what I signed up for, AV-547. You did too."

He mutters something under her breath, like _I didn't_ , and she feels hope stir.

Then he glances back, alarmed recognition in his eyes. She reaches for her blaster, but it is too late.

A jerk of his hands and the ship goes into dizzying tailspin, throwing her off balance. The ship walls rush at her head.

She hears the crack of bone against wall as her vision goes back.

When she wakes up on one of the Star Destroyers, the Imperial doctor calls her _Kestrel Dawn_ and smiles with teeth.

\-- 

Humans do not die from broken ribs unless they puncture a lung. Just in case, the Imperial doctor breaks only one, so every breath is a blade stabbing into her chest, but there is no chance of escape. There are no torture droids on board, she gathers, so the doctor has taken its role.

"We don't have resources to keep you alive, my dear," she explains, lips twisting into a wry smile, as Jyn breaths through the sharp pain.

She loses her fingernails one by one over the span of half an hour, before the doctor starts on her toes, and then her feet.

"I don't have time for this," sighs the doctor, picking up a twist of barbed wire that will rip through skin. "I have _actual_ patients from _your battle_ on the planet to attend to. Now, tell me, Kestrel, how long were you on Scarif? Easy question."

Jyn spits in her face.

\--

Cassian wakes to the sound of her breathing, soft, shallow gasps that send chills down his spine.

His muscles ache with the motion of sitting up, but the dizziness is gone, and his thoughts ring clear. The ship moves with the smoothness of a well-traveled hyperspace lane; half the cargo boxes shudder with each tiny movement, half-empty, the others a mix of weapons and emergency supplies. There's a tangle of machinery that he recognizes as signal jammers.

Jyn is curled into a tight ball in between cargo boxes, one hand on her blaster, the other beneath her head. Beneath her eyelids, her eyes flicker, caught in some nightmare. It is, along with her breathing, the only indication of distress. Her face is smooth, her throat silent.

She wouldn't want to be seen like this.

"Jyn," he says into the quiet. Her name tastes strange, the shape too familiar for how long he has not used it.

Her eyes open; she shudders, once, before falling into stillness. He waits as her gaze flicks around the room until they settle on him with something like relief, as she takes a moment to compose her face.

"You were watching me sleep," she says, flat, pain curled into a ball and thrown like a punch.

His mind is clear enough to think, to link the past year together: Jyn's obvious survival, her absence from the Rebellion, running from him on Arkanis, the name _Brianna Sotar_. The scars on the tip of her fingers which he had not registered before, and the knowledge that General Draven had told him, with a distant loss, that there were no Rebellion ships to escape Scarif's surface after his.

He has questions, and for that, he needs trust. It had been easy to fall back into it when delirious with hunger -- which Cassian does not want to think about -- but now, wariness raises its head.

He needs her trust.

"Here," he says, pulling her necklace from his neck and offering it as a gift. "This belongs to you."

She's not leaving this ship until he has answers.

\--

TBC


	5. Hyperspace

_Alpha Hosnia Virek Coruscant seven three forty five Naboo. Alpha Hosnia Virek Coruscant seven three forty five Naboo..._

Everything hurts.

She's not badly injured. Broken ribs, not more than two, that make each breath a small, stabbing agony; fingernails and toenails gone; feet on _fire_ from where barbed wire whipped across the soles. A couple of bruises, a split lip, chemicals that make each nerve ending scream with light touch. It hurts, and she'll need antibiotics when infection sets in, but she should be able to _move_ , and she is able to see.

Which is fortunate because a face swims into focus. "Are you coming or not?"

Familiar face topped with ginger hair, familiar words in that same tone of voice. It's the pilot that brought her to the Star Destroyer, who was deft enough to knock her unconscious before she could shoot him.

"I'm pretty comfortable here," she croaks. She tries to spit in his face, or failing that, cough. Maybe he'll get something nasty, kneel over, and die.

"Until she _kills you_ ," he says.

Her hair is plastered to her skin and her mouth tastes of blood. The pain is distracting, but his grief, during the flight off Scarif, appears in her mind. She says, viciously, "Until _you_ kill me."

She has miscalculated. He shrugs. "I'm a starfighter pilot. I signed up to kill for peace." She's about to laugh, when he says, "I didn't sign up for _this_."

Her bruises, he means. She must look as bad as she feels, a common side effect of using physical torture instead of purely chemical means.

He tosses her a pile of bacta patches, careless of the expense, before actually removing her restraints. An aristocrat, then. Only Imperial officers indulge in wastefulness, the foot soldiers do not. As she wraps her feet and adds another across her chest, he keeps his blaster up. He doesn't look away when she grabs a black medic coat and a syringe of analgesics, biting through her lip to hold her scream in her throat.

Jyn holds back a sigh of relief when she shoots the painkillers into her arm. She keeps the needle uncapped.

In the distance, the Star Destroyer groans like bending metal. The lights in the room flicker; most, she sees now, were already off, and swathes of machinery lie quiet.

Irritation crosses his face. "Ion pulse missiles. Just how many do you _have_?"

As if on cue, the few remaining pieces of machinery fall silent as the ion pulse scrambles electric circuits. On the other side of the plastisteel walls, a familiar, hated voice snaps out instructions. " _Get_ the backup generators working, I have five men on life support and thirty in bacta--"

Jyn fights the pressing urge to march to the next room and take out the doctor's eye with her syringe needle. The image is not as satisfying as the deed would be. She glances at the pilot, who seems nonplussed by the chaos rising outside the infirmary doors.

"Looks like it's your lucky day," he says. The faint lights cast his face into shadow. He walks towards her, and Jyn holds herself stiff, wary, but all he does is hand her an authorisation card -- not his.

"Why are you helping me?" she asks, then. In another life, she might have grappled for the blaster and run; in another life, she _did_. He's close enough she could jab her syringe needle in his neck. The possibility stirs in the back of her mind still, but even as the painkillers begin to work, she's aware of the scrape of each breath, the slowness of her fingers.

"Because the Galactic Empire is better than this."

A principled Imperial. She hesitates. Every instinct shouts to leave now, but Cassian has rubbed off on her. The Empire could stand to lose more pilots with his talent for flying. Besides, if he's a skilled spy feigning compassion, her words won't make any difference either way.

"And if it isn't?" she asks, gesturing around her. 

"It is, Kestrel Dawn," he says, with the determined belief of one who is trying to convince himself.

"If you're going to kill," she says, "And least make sure the cause is worth it."

The pilot doesn't answer.

At the door, she doesn't hesitate or turn back, but she does say, "Thanks."

"Thane," he offers. A common name in the Mid-Rim that would give nothing away, if she were ever to try and find his identity. Certainly far less a risk than revealing his call designation. When she leaves the infirmary, he vanishes into the depths of the Destroyer.

\--

Outside, it's chaos, too many people focused on patching up blown-out machinery. It's so easy to steal a ship, with her badge and her coat, she wonders if facial recognition software has malfunctioned too. When a medic leaves in a cargo vessel too quickly to have waited for clearance, Jyn finds a similar ship. She catches sight of _the doctor_ as she leaves, hatred swelling like a bubble until she's ready to burst, and has to close her eyes as a distraction.

She thinks of seeing Cassian's face alive again, his nose buried in her hair, and steers the ship away.

Jyn lands on Dantooine before the fuel runs out, and the dirt beneath her feet is a relief. Part of her wonders, vaguely, if it will be enough to silence the nightmares that come with the way her feet throbs, walking.

She doesn't return to the Rebellion for the first few days, because she's not an idiot. She's not yet fast enough to outrun any trackers. Leading the Empire to Yavin IV would be like spitting on Rogue One's sacrifice. (She dreams of a litany of names that start with _Lyra_ and end with _Kaytoo_ , that night, instead of wires digging into her flesh; memories are harsh that way.)

It takes just as long to contact the rebel pilot who carried her friends off Scarif -- _Alpha Hosnia Virek Coruscant seven three forty five Naboo_ , she remembers. The first is a brief transmission; she gets a glimpse of Cassian's face as he floats in bacta. A side profile that wouldn't trigger facial recognition, but she recognizes him all the same.

The second time, that's when the transmission cuts off. And after -- well, there isn't anything on the base to return _to_. The Death Star takes her new family just like it did her old, no matter how much she fought this time, and the world of Alderaan with it.

She's the only one left. She thought that she would die alone, and found herself living instead.

The feeling is too familiar, and she is too tired, to hurt as she does.

But she lives. And it hurts.

\--

_Now_

Cassian watches her with none of the softness from before. She does not read suspicion, but the offer of her mother's crystal doesn't match the neutral mask that has stolen across his face.

"I didn't think I would see this again," she whispers. Her legs feel clumsy, twitching when she rises.

The crystal is cool in her hand. She relishes the sensation of carved symbols for just a moment, then raises her eyes.

Cassian is studying her hand with more interest than it merits. She tugs the necklace away and takes the opportunity to dig both hands into her pockets. Her feet sting as she shuffles. Phantom pain; her feet are scarred and numb.

"I would not have lost something so important," Cassian says. A smile ghosts across his mouth, and she feels light-headed from it. The knowledge he kept the necklace around his neck seems to have burrowed into her chest, leaving nothing but warmth, banishing the last traces of her dream.

"It was my mother's," she admits.

His smile fades, replaced for an instant by sharp focus, a spark of interest. He hesitates and she cannot read the reason.

"You sent it to safety," he says.

Jyn juts her chin out. Saying more feels like admitting too much, and _he's_ in Intelligence. She sent the necklace away, and she sent him, and now, the fact of his survival, the reality of his arms closing around her -- she's still not sure what to do with it.

"What happened after Scarif?" he asks, a strange weight hanging off each word. They sound like they've been waiting, locked in his throat, while his brain pushed other things out first.

Better than _where have you been_ , and this at least she can answer.

"An Imperial pilot rescued me," she says. "He thought I was a Death Trooper. I escaped."

He waits, but Jyn has run out of words. Her fingers curl into fists around the Kyber necklace. Cassian must read her reluctance, because he sighs.

"I need to contact the Rebellion," he decides.

\--

Jyn digs through the supply boxes for more food while Cassian goes up to the cockpit to fiddle with controls. She lasts about two minutes before the sound of his movement isn't enough; she needs the reassurance of his presence in her line of vision.

She reaches the cockpit in time to acknowledge an astromech and a Toydarian pilot, and hears Cassian saying, "There was no focused interrogation on Arkanis, General. Ghost found the ship before anyone paid attention."

"Are you certain?"

Cassian inclines his head.

It takes a moment to place the face on the monitor -- they must be out of Imperial Space, to have enough security to transmit visually -- as General Draven of the Alliance. He catches sight of her at the same instant, and both his eyebrows twitch up.

"Erso," Draven acknowledges, a faint sneer in his voice. The feeling is mutual. "I'm surprised you came out of hiding."

"I wasn't hiding," she says flatly. She's not a member of the Alliance, and his scorn means less than nothing to her.

"Desertion, then," he says. "You made it off a Star Destroyer. You could have delivered the plans to us instead of waiting for a planet to be destroyed."

Jyn's about to snap back when his words register. Ice sinks down her spine, spreads across her back. "Off a Star Destroyer."

"Yes," he says, and continues speaking with Cassian, dismissing her, closing the matter.

Cassian, who has turned expressionless. Cassian, who stands among the best of Alliance Intelligence, and directly under Davits Draven's command.

If Draven knew the details of her escape from death, Cassian would have too. She had assumed he thought her dead on Scarif. If Draven, and by extension Rebel Intelligence, knew otherwise... There is a filter on information going down the grapevine, but she cannot think of any reason Intelligence would keep her survival from Cassian.

Cassian knew. And he never -- never what? She should know better than to expect something of other people.

He knew, and he asked her again in the cargo hold anyway. She has been a fool. That wasn't curiosity, but the beginning of an interrogation. The necklace, the softness and warmth, was the first step. He did not ask her how she survived, in the unguarded moment of his illness, she remembers with sudden clarity; he had asked where she'd _been_.

She leaves the cockpit. Her skin feels dull, cold.

\--

Cassian finds her five minutes later. She's not sure what to say, what to do with the accusations building in her throat, so she ignores him. She wrests off her boots, wincing at the sight of the blaster burn. One of the problems with the scars on her feet is inability to sense broken skin; at least it hasn't become infected yet.

"Jyn," he starts.

"Back with more questions?" she cuts him off. She does know what to say, after all.

He doesnt respond.

She grits her teeth as she slaps bacta on her foot, and examines the other one for any injury. There's just scar tissue, same as before. A bruise on her knee when she kneeled on the floor. Nothing much, really.

"Did that happen on the Star Destroyer?" he asks. She glances up. His eyes are hooded watching her tend to the injury, but his eyes linger on the soles of her feet, the angle of her toes. Her fingertips, earlier.

Hours earlier, and she might have mistaken his expression for concern. But she remembers Draven's pointed question, in the cockpit. "The doctor wasn't very good. I didn't tell them anything."

"You were injured," he says, an edge to his words. "Why didn't you come back for help?"

"Haven't you heard? I was _hiding_ ," she says.

He crouches down until their eyes are level. She gets around this by pulling her boots back on and paying careful attention as she tightens the laces. He would pass for patient, she thinks, if she couldn't see the tremble in his fingers.

"You did not have to run. The Rebellion would have helped you," he murmurs, like he _believes_ her. Like he believes Draven's accusation, that she would have buried her head in the sand. Why wouldn't he? He knew she was alive, and that she did not return to the Rebellion. He's already willing to believe her capable of abandonment.

 _You never looked for me_ , she swallows back. She'll die on Scarif's beaches before she would admit something so raw. He never even let her know he was _alive_ , instead of vaporized into stardust along with billions of other lives. He must have known what it would have meant to her, his death on her conscience, the fact of his survival.

"I didn't think there was anything worth going back for," she tells him instead. It's the truth, after all.

His jaw clenches.

"Why attack an Imperial vessel, then?" he points out, voice almost fiercely even.

For Ashla, and for the memory of him, but he doesn't need to know that.

"Revenge," she says. "I didn't even know you were on board."

All true, and she watches his face. She wants to seal his questions away with the sharpness of her words. She wants to see a wince, or exhaustion, or some acknowledgement that her disregard means something. Even if it hadn't been disregard at all.

His face settles into a neutral mask that makes the hairs at the back of her neck stand up.

"And so you ran on Arkanis."

She blinks, uncertain of his meaning, but she shrugs rather than admit it. "Is the interrogation over now?"

He stands, towering over her. She still cannot read the expression on his face, and he turns away too quickly for her to figure it out.

\--

She dozes off for a few hours and when she wakes, they're back in hyperspace. It occurs to her that in the chaos of the past few hours, she's not certain of the ship's destination. Still, the Rebellion is hardly going to harm her, whatever their dislike.

It takes her a moment to realize Cassian is in the hanger again. She had not expected to see him until they landed. There's a moment where she thinks he looks wistful, maybe sad, but it shutters the moment he realizes she's awake.

"Hoth," he says, to her unanswered question. "A few more hours."

"Oh." The unpleasant possibility of freezing to death flicks through her mind. "Maybe you should just shoot me now. It would be kinder."

She's only half-joking. He doesn't laugh. If he had laughed, she might have tried to kill him after all, for all that anger has faded to numbness.

"Bodhi and Chirrut survived, if you were wondering," he tells her.

Her breath catches in her throat. She had been afraid to wonder, and after listening to Draven, it hurt to.

"Baze?" she murmurs.

"Three days in bacta and he was as good as new," Cassian says.

She bows her head, hand reaching up for her kyber crystal. For the first time in a year, she finds it around her neck where it should be, and relief lightens her shoulders. The thought makes her pause, and she remembers, again, that Cassian had worn the crystal around his neck.

"Brianna Sotar," he says slowly, before she can question him about it. There's both a realization and uncertainty in his voice. "I heard about you. You smuggled for rebels."

She blinks, unsure of his meaning. "Your Rebellion didn't tend to stab me in the back."

Cassian doesn't look at her.

"You weren't hiding from the Rebellion," he says. It's not a question, but she feels the knot in her chest unclench ever so little. The feeling of understanding, or at least a good faith attempt at it, is not one she often has; she should enjoy it while she can.

"I didn't go back to Yavin," she tells him. "But I wasn't going to stop fighting the Empire." One way or another.

She doesn't need to prove herself to him. But she needs to hear it for herself, the words enunciated out loud.

In the corner of her eye, he smiles, wry, almost self-deprecating.

"Is that what you wanted to hear?" she asks.

"Something like that," he says, and she is cannot say why, but she knows he's lying. "We'll arrive on Hoth in six hours."

\--

TBC


	6. Hoth

His third mission after Scarif is to Coruscant, a brief search and extraction for a missing agent. It is the last time he leaves Jyn's necklace behind. The agent has been undercover for five years, nestled deep in the spider web of information from the capital, and valuable for it. The orders are clear. There has been no word for four weeks, on a planet crawling with Imperials and every droid under the sun. If she's clean, he needs to bring her back to the base. If there's any hint of a security breach, Cassian is to deal with it.

It takes a week tracing her steps into Coruscant's lower levels to find her, holed up recovering from the Empire's attention. She's boarded up the windows, but did not have the strength or funds to line the walls against thermal scans. He considers taking the shot from a distance. An ion blast between the eyes, vaporizing skull and brain. A quick death. It would be painless, and he would be gone before anyone were the wiser.

They've met three times in the past during his missions on Coruscant. She provided backup once, and information another time. The third time, they intersected while he took care of a loose end and she recruited from among the Imperial aides. Several have since been moved under Draven's direct command. She's not at the center of the rebel spy web, but she is close.

He sheathes his blaster.

"Lets get this over with," she breathes, hoarse, when she sees him in the doorway.

"Who found you? What did they learn?"

She shakes her head. "Who do you _think_? And what could I have given them?" She drags in a gasp of air. "Tolson. I got him, but I don't know who he reported to."

He waits.

"Frankly, Fulcrum, I don't know enough to give anything away," she gets out. "I've been here and blind against ours for five years."

"That's not what I saw two years ago," he says.

"I know _my_ informants and operatives," she says. Her chin jerks up in defiance, words pointed. "And whoever else needed my help."

He doesn't blink. "What happened to the lullaby pill?"

Her mouth presses into a thin, unhappy line. "I knew I could get out."

Her wounds are too extensive for a brief stay with droids. Interrogation protocol is to use chemical means of enhancing pain first, then a carrot-and-stick approach targeted to whatever personal details pain uncovered. True injury usually only comes after that. She was interrogated long enough to be wounded, that delirium could have set in and brought secrets through her lips, but she had not used the pill.

Reckless, defiant.

She's not putting up a fight now. Cassian wonders if she knows he disabled the wiring for her repulsion shield before opening her door, if she knows he could take her out now.

"And I _did_ ," she says. "I kriffing _escaped_ , and they haven't found me yet. So what now, Fulcrum?"

What now, indeed. She cannot stay on Coruscant; that much is clear. If she had allies, they would have slowed him when he started for her door. She has information on the spider web, experience on which to cut and which to spool closer, but she isn't irreplaceable. A valuable operative, loyal, possibly compromised -- possibly not. Too dangerous to bring back to base, and too valuable to leave.

 _She thought you were a worthy cause_.

"Now we leave, Fulcrum," he says in return, and she closes her eyes, breathes out.

He does not kill her, and he does not bring her back to Yavin IV. Coruscant, the heart of Imperial rule, would smother any message he tried to send out, so he leaves her with sympathizers he recruited on a Mid Rim planet and reports to General Draven after landing. She is not going anywhere soon with those injuries and he passes on the location so the Alliance can assess her further.

There is a long pause from General Draven after he concludes.

"We'll send a team down," the general says at last, and terminates the transmission.

He retrieves Jyn's necklace from underneath a floorboard when he returns to base, and doesn't return it there again.

\--

Hoth freezes the blood in her veins, the breath in her lungs, and that's after they've left the raging blizzard for the tunnels underground.

She's searched and scanned and the ship's interior disassembled. Cassian's presence seems enough that only one blaster is actually trained on her. Jyn almost tells him not to worry. Three minutes more and she will lose the ability to move, much less elude the swarm of bodies in the hanger in a daring escape.

Beside her, Cassian is doing a good approximation of a man about to collapse from exhaustion and lie there until the ice crawls over his body. He looks like he hasn't slept a wink since reporting to Draven, and crosses the shuttle with a limp. Even now, his face is placid, calm.

Jyn bites her tongue. He doesn't need her concern, and she doesn't want to feel it.

"This way," one of the rebels orders. When they follow, the other soldiers stay behind, content that the cold has done their work for them.

By the time she comes face to face with Draven, exhaustion has won over fury, even over petulance. He's bent over a console, as much as his oversized coats let him bend at all, face washed neon blue from the monitor displays. The briefing room isn't much warmer than the corridors, and Jyn wonders if that's on purpose. She can imagine a prisoner's brain fogging up, lies crashing down around him or her. What she cannot imagine is bringing Cassian here while his temperature plummets.

Draven glances up, and when his eyes land on her, Jyn has to smother the white-hot urge to break his jaw. Fortunately, her muscles are too stiff with cold to follow through.

"General," Cassian greets. He doesn't salute, and Jyn waits, but Draven doesn't even blink.

"Captain," he acknowledges. "Sit before you fall. You too, Erso."

Cassian sinks into the chair, giving in for just a second. He straightens his shoulders, stiff and upright, a moment later. Jyn stays standing.

"Report," Draven orders.

Cassian begins.

\--

Draven does not interrupt, though Jyn is sure it's more due to Cassian's succinct words than courtesy. She listens too, his voice momentarily soothing her impatience, and her hands fist when he describes being captured by Stormtroopers. Two weeks. He had spent two weeks in a prison cell because of a moment of distraction, though he doesn't say what the distraction was. The memory of his hot skin, his unbroken ribs under her fingers, wars with the memory of stinging, then burning in her feet. She swallows.

He describes the interior of the prisoner vessel, disarming the Stormtrooper when he got too close. Jyn stares ahead when he names her specifically as the one who found him, because his words cannot convey what it felt like to see him alive again. Her entire memory of the ship curves around that one moment, but his voice is dispassionate. She hates herself for it. She hates him a little more.

Draven stops him for the first time when he touches on the pirates.

"General Syndulla's team has made contact," he says. He does not elaborate further.

"There were no pursuers. Given her assistance during the mission, her actions on Scarif, and her various dealings with us as Brianna Sotar, Jyn Erso was not a threat. I didn't want to delay returning in order to let her leave."

Draven stares at Cassian. "There were fifteen planets in the regions you dropped into real space, thirteen with no real Imperial presence." For the first time time since entering the room, his eyes shift to her. She scowls back. "I didn't expect you to step foot willingly on a rebel base, either, Erso."

"I didn't expect to be here," Jyn says, before Cassian can respond. Her patience wears thin to the point of tearing. "Your Alliance owes me ten thousand credits. At least give me back my ship and we'll call it even."

"Your ship," Draven repeats.

"It's still on Arkanis, with the cell under _Loredo_." She feels rather than sees Cassian glance at her, the fleeting instant he tenses further, and knows Draven sees it too.

"You can have it," Draven says. He's still watching her, with a great deal more scrutiny than he spent on Cassian and his assassination.

"Good."

"Why are you here?" he asks flatly.

"I'm not under your command," she responds, with more teeth than is warranted.

Draven's shoulders heave in an approximation of a shrug. "You want to get off planet? You answer."

"I wanted the truth," she says. "How you knew I was alive, and how many databases have Jyn Erso linked with Brianna Sotar. The galaxy's a dangerous place. I want to know where not to go."

His face stays impassive, unconvinced. She lifts her chin.

"What reason do I have to lie? I nearly died to bring down the Empire. I would never spy for them."

Draven's brows rise, the first sign of surprise.

"And if you knew I was on a Star Destroyer, you know they couldn't break me," she continues, staring him right in the eye. In the corner of her eye, Cassian's jaw clenches.

"An incompetent doctor, not a torture droid," Draven points out. He knows that too. It's a startling, detailed fact that means there was an informant on the ship.

"Pain is pain," she says.

Draven actually looks like he's considering her words. She draws back, teeth chattering from a combination of adrenaline and cold. She's not entirely sure what she's arguing. She's not entirely sure her answers were truthful, either. Draven was right. Jyn could have asked to stop on one of the planets in realspace, and she had not. Cassian had not offered the option at all, and she wonders at that.

Cassian, who shows no signs of impatience, but whose lips are going blue with cold. Cassian, who spares her glance in her direction, and addresses Draven.

"We owe her."

Warmth spreads through her chest with a flicker of surprise.

Draven does not agree. There's nothing but disappointed expectation on his face.

"Get your wounds tended to, captain," he says, with heavy finality. He has judged Cassian. He has judged her too, she realizes, but his verdict is a surprise. "I'll have the slicers go through your records, Erso. Then I want you off the base."

Her stomach lurches. She stands up to leave.

"How long have you known about Jyn Erso?" It's Cassian, and his eyes are locked onto Draven. There's a hint of defiance in his voice, something that tugs at her heart in a way Jyn hates, even though she's not certain what he means.

Draven seems to understand. His gaze rises to the ceiling. If he were another man, Jyn would have thought he were rolling his eyes.

"Captain," he says, with heavy patience, "I trust you with orders to end interrogations. I trust you to filter information from Albarrio sector. Do you really think I would keep her survival a secret?"

What?

"What General Draven means," says a new, clear voice, "is that it wasn't his decision."

Mon Mothma stands in the doorway in robes and a parka as white as Hoth's snowfall, but softer. She seems to glow from within. The image of purity raised Jyn's hackles on Yavin IV. Now, she does not even blink.

"Continue with Captain Andor, General. Jyn Erso," she says, "walk with me."

\--

In the silence, Cassian watches General Draven.

"That was a lie," Cassian says. It's all that's required to convey his meaning.

General Draven has never hesitated in twisting orders when he thought it would serve the Rebellion. Cassian had trusted him more for it. If he wanted Cassian to know, Cassian would have known.

Draven studies him, cool and unreadable now that Mon Mothma is no longer watching. He was not Cassian's first teacher, but between the face he wore playing politics and the face he wore during undercover missions, he is Cassian's most effective.

"You were on Coruscant when we found out," he says. "I would have told you until then."

Cassian knows better than to close his eyes. He wants to. "That was a test.

"You failed," Draven agrees, arms crossed, and Cassian connects the dots in his mind. Arkanis. The target a Moff who kept slaves. Any rebel would have done it without thinking twice, dangerous as it was, and Cassian had never been sent on such _clean_ missions in the past. "You were the best because you could make the hard choices. A crying face didn't stop you from what needed to be done. It stops you now." His eyes move meaningfully to the door, where Jyn has left with Mon Mothma. "Don't think I don't know how it started."

" _Futility_ stops me now. We don't always have all the information."

"It never bothered you before," Draven says.

It bothered Cassian every time, and he did it anyway. He's not sure how to phrase this, and watching Draven's face, knows he does not need to. To Draven, it is irrelevant. He's not what he was, and Draven works with the tool he has rather than the weapon he does not.

"I thought she was dead," Cassian reminds him. 

"You thought she was dead, and Coruscant still happened. I don't have time to argue about the academic," Draven says dismissively. "You'll continue your current duties, Captain Andor. See to them."

When a tool breaks into a different configuration, Draven simply finds another use for it. It's why he's head of Intelligence. Cassian has never hated Draven for it until now.

Cassian nods. Before he leaves, he addresses Draven a final time. Draven values tools and doesn't sacrifice them easily, if there's any use left. He knows this much.

"She has worked with the Rebellion, and I don't think she will stop after she leaves."

Cassian doesn't even know why she came all the way to Hoth. He only knows she will go again.

\--

Mon Mothma walks faster than Jyn expected. The crowd parts, and curious faces peer in her direction, blank and without recognition. Actually -- no, she transported Tarko off-planet once. It had seemed like a useful investment at the time. All she gets back is a cheerful wave. She's not sure his gratitude extends to letting her escape Hoth.

"I'm glad to see you're well," Mon Mothma says, clouds of water vapor puffing from her mouth with her words.

"What do you mean," Jyn says, unwilling to be deterred, "that it wasn't Draven's choice?"

They are striding through the base in a way that burns more energy than Jyn has, but she prefers this over rest. Walking sends her circulation where she should be going, and the coat Mon Mothma directed a soldier to retrieve helps even more.

Mon Mothma does not answer at first. Jyn contemplates stopping, but she does not know where else she would go. The meeting of Senators burns through her mind like an old, aching wound, a _what could have been_ if the Alliance had acted sooner. Mon Mothma, she thinks, had believed her story even before she left for Scarif. That means something.

They stop not in warmer quarters, or even more private ones, but in front of a pillar carved of ice beside the Intelligence archives. It extends, tall and spindly, towards the cavernous rooftop. There are countless patterns carved into the ice. Jyn is about to demand answers again when she realizes that the symbols are words. Names. One steals her breath.

 _Galen Erso_.

"What's this?" she grits out instead.

"A reminder of what we have lost, and what we have to do," is the calm response.

Her fingers itch to touch the ice, the gleaming white.

"On Chalindra," Mon Mothma says, soft enough she almost seems human, "white is the color of mourning. It seemed appropriate to name everyone who had a hand in destroying the Death Star. At that point, we couldn't name you, in case someone decided to make you a target again."

" _You_ knew too," she says.

"We found out nine months ago," Mon Mothma confirms.

Jyn frowns. "Not immediately?"

Her mouth twitches. "You have skill in recruiting too, Jyn. There was a defector from the Star Destroyer who named you as a reason he left. He took some time to find us. We didn't know until then."

She tries to figure out who she might have inspired and fails.

"Thane Kyrell, an Imperial pilot," Mon Mothma says, reading her expression. "He defected when the Empire's atrocities became too much, but watching your torture and Scarif's destruction was the first step. In his debrief, he mentioned a Kestrel Dawn who escaped his Star Destroyer after Scarif. He was," she adds wryly, "somewhat disappointed you couldn't vouch for his character."

Jyn nods, attempting to put a face to the name. She has an impression of a ship swaying until she was knocked unconscious.

The time-line hits her.

"Nine months," she murmurs. "Three months after Scarif."

"It takes people a long time to change their beliefs," Mon Mothma says.

"No, I -- never mind."

"I heard most of the conversation. Rest assured, Jyn, that there are no records connecting Brianna Sotar and Jyn Erso. That's the least we could do."

Jyn had moved through planets as silently as a desert rat. Now she is beginning to understand why.

She steps forward, tracing the names on the column. Most, she does not recognize, but there are names from Rogue One: Melshi, Sefla, on and on, names in different languages, and the first name on the list is Galen Erso. The very last is her own.

She should feel worse that the names stretch so far, and in an abstract way, she does. But Jyn had not known them long, and she did not hear them die. There is a pang of regret, and she has dreamed once or twice of human bodies falling into sand, but her nightmares have been reserved for others.

Now, Jyn bows her head.

"We had a debt to them, and we had a debt to you." Beside her, she hears Mon Mothma sigh. "In the name of the fallen, we fight on. But you were promised your freedom in exchange for assistance, and paid for that many times over. I have not forgotten what we did to you, Jyn. When I heard you were alive, it was a chance to repay the debt and keep the promise. We left you with your freedom and with your anonymity."

"How many people knew?" Her hands feel numb.

"General Draven debriefed Thane Kyrell, and he shared the information with me. The Empire has ears everywhere. I thought you would appreciate safety over fame as an Alliance hero." She feels Mon Mothma's eyes on her. "I didn't know I should have told others until I saw Captain Andor today."

They kept it quiet with some degree of good intentions. Somewhere, in the way the Rebellion carved her father's name on the wall _after_ killing him, there had been _kindness_. Jyn wants to scream at the unfairness of it. She wants to crawl in a corner as much as she wants to break someone's jaw.

"Of course," Mon Mothma continues, wry again, "that anonymity might be over now that you're on Hoth Base. What's next is up to you."

"I," Jyn says, "want my ship."

"Perhaps you would like to rest first," Mon Mothma says.

The exhaustion wins out. She's assigned a bunk on the base and stays there for the night.

\--

Jyn spent barely three days on Yavin IV, if she adds her two visits together and is generous about it. The base bustled with men and women dedicated to a single cause, a unifying thread among very disparate people, and Jyn hated it and longed for it while she was there.

Hoth feels the same, but the walls press in. She cannot move outside for fresh air or silence lest her fingers fall off from frostbite. There are a some rebels she recognizes from her dealings as Brianna Sotar, but the identity seems fragile, face to face with her past. She ends up in the mess hall the next morning, because hunger is a fine motivator. That's where Cassian's exhausted shoulders catch her attention.

He's on the other side of the room, scowling into his caf. As she watches, a man with a datapad approaches, and there's a short exchange before he shoots up, nearly vibrating with energy. He begins to move, a lone figure parting chattering friends as he strides towards the exit.

_How many people knew?_

Mon Mothma wears white in every meeting, and General Draven has ordered assassinations without her knowledge. Cassian carried them out. Mon Mothma might have kept Jyn's survival a secret, but she's under no illusions General Draven would do the same if he did not agree.

She closes her eyes. She could let this go. Jyn spent a year surviving after she lost him, lost every member of her fledging family, she could do it again if she--

The thought refuses to finish. She opens her eyes again and goes after him.

\--

He is nearly out of sight when she gets to the door, and for a minute, she stumbles after the impression of his back.

"Cassian," she says, loud enough that some of the rebels give her a second glance. He doesn't slow, and doubt twinges in her gut. The corridor is loud with chatter -- one couple argues in the center of it, faces flushed -- so she keeps going.

Her shoulders crash into more than one other person. Jyn doesn't stay to catch whether irritation or true anger follow.

There is he, turning the corner again into what she vaguely recognizes as a corridor to the main hanger, and this time she raises her voice.

" _Cassian_."

His steps falter, and when he comes to a halt, his entire body stills along with his feet. She is almost close enough to touch him when he faces her, lips parted in a hint of surprise. He making a good attempt at appearing placid, but the flicker of his eyes betrays anxiety. Maybe he is still tired. She doesn't remember reading him so well a year ago, until the very end.

"The slicers finished going through your files this morning," he says, intent on her.

"Oh," she says. "What did they find?"

"One database links Jyn Erso with Brianna Sotar. Ours."

"They won't scrub that link, would they?"

He almost smiles. "No."

 _I thought you were dead_. She bites back on the words. She needs to think like he does, if she wants the truth.

"Are you here to say goodbye?" he asks, and her internal war falters. His gaze shifts just over her shoulder. She moves aside before he says a word. A Mon Calamari scurries by, wrench in one hand, a datapad in the other.

"To say goodbye," she echoes.

"You got the information you came for."

This accusation again, like she would just _leave_. Her eyes narrow, a wave of fury sweeping up her body, and he blinks.

"Jyn," he begins.

"How did you escape Alderaan?" she interrupts. It's not a less revealing question, not by much, and it forces its way out despite her best efforts. "Were you ever really there?"

A faint crease prints on his forehead, for only a moment. "Yes. I left with the last batches of bacta. How did you know?"

"I contacted the pilot after. Well." She shrugs.

Up close, she can see the clench of his fists, the deep, slow breath he draws in. He has been agitated each time she brought the Star Destroyer up, or with any reminder of her injuries. 

"You contacted the Rebellion," he says, as if asking for confirmation.

"Twice," she says. "The second time, the transmission was cut off by the Death Star. There were still bacta tanks in the background, I thought you were--" The words choke in her throat.

There is a very, very long pause, and then he is stepping closer, from within arm distance, to close enough she catches the scent of ice, gunpowder, and the sharpness of antiseptic. He stares down at her, searching.

"You thought we died on Alderaan?"

"It seemed a reasonable guess," she says. His proximity is distracting, and his gaze burns. She drops her eyes to his throat. It isn't much better. She can see his adam's apple bob as he swallows.

" _You_ managed to escape the Death Star on Scarif."

"Barely. Improbably." She closes her eyes to block everything out. "I didn't expect to."

" _I know_." Impossibly, anger edges his words. He repeats them, softer, with a strange revelation in his voice. "I know. Jyn, I thought you died on Scarif. We all did."

Most of the Rebellion did. She can imagine it, too. If their roles were reversed, if he had given his life to save hers (like he almost _had_ ), she would have been furious, and if she had left him on Scarif, _devastated_. She would have thought him dead.

But he isn't just anyone, and she could not stand it if he were lying. He has, in the past, been very good at lying.

"Why would General Draven keep anything from _you_?" She doesn't mean to sound accusatory, but it comes out sharp.

The sound he makes is half laughter, half a scoff. "Why do you think?"

She shakes her head, but the memory springs up regardless. His smile, his words, an expression of defiance pronounced in the middle of a busy hanger. It had washed her despair clean away, like nothing before or after could. Draven would have understood the action as disobedience. Desertion.

"You disobeyed orders."

"Not exactly."

His hand brushes her chest, presses against where her crystal lies. She opens her eyes. Cassian watches her like the action is an answer.

It is.

Action, she thinks, has always been the answer. Not words. Maybe she cannot trust what he says, but he had scaled the datavault for her while so badly injured, and he had followed her to Scarif. Those, she can explain as being part of the mission, for someone who would do anything for the Rebellion.

He was wearing her necklace on the prisoner vessel, with no identity fitted over his, no angle he was trying to work. She has searched through his bags, found them without any personal effects. But he carried her necklace next to his heart. There is no excuse for that.

He had not offered to leave her on another planet, on the way to Hoth. There is no excuse for that either.

"I can see," she says slowly, "why Draven wouldn't like that."

He glances down, and Jyn realizes belatedly that she's curved her hand around his arm. His mouth twitches. "To be fair, General Draven gave me no orders about avoiding Scarif. He accepted it well enough when we returned." He hesitates. "Not all generals are like Draven. Others make a difference in the open for what we believe in."

Someone clears his throat. Jyn pulls back, in time to see that a number of interested faces have turned their way, and they spectators have blocked the corridor. They decide to scatter in the face of her glare.

Mon Mothma was right. She consoles herself that most don't know her by name.

" _Are_ you here to say goodbye?" he asks again, in the quiet when they're left alone.

"No," she says. The location strikes her without warning -- they're on the path to the hanger, where one might conceivably catch a ride off the planet, and he had run. "Were _you_?"

"Maybe." His fingers are soft on her jaw, a line of warmth, and she sways into it. "I'm glad I don't have to."

\--

TBC


	7. Galaxy

On Echo Base, as Jyn learns it is called, stares press against her skull like physical touch, bruising her temples. The sensation amplifies ten-fold with each gaze that skitters aside under her glare. It worsens a hundred times over for each person who refuses to look away, and her thoughts rattle in her skull.

An argument in the main corridor to the hanger. Jyn should have known better. Among the Partisans, inconsequential dramas had spread like wildfire, depending on the day. The Rebellion works similarly.

She escapes, wedges herself in the corner of the room she slept in, staring at the other double-bunk bed. It is there that Cassian finds her again.

He looks as exhausted as she feels, shoulders heavy, mouth tight, but his eyes crinkle in the corners when they catch on her face. She hesitates in the moment before opening her door and stepping back. Her quarters are temporary, whether she stays or not. She should not feel protective, even if years alone meant defending her place of retreat.

He sits on the coverless bunk, and warmth spreads in her chest at the sight of him, here. She should not feel that either.

She sinks back onto her own bed across from him. Quiet settles in the inches of space between their knees, like a slow exhale of relief. It feels good. Comfortable. Steady, like a promise kept, Cassian coming to find her again when he did not have to.

Cassian watches her now with a hint of disbelief. She holds his gaze. _I thought you died on Scarif._

"Do you ever wonder what we would have done," she murmurs, without quite knowing why, "if there hadn't been a ship?"

He shakes his head. "I didn't need to. I lived it."

"Not the ship that found me. The ship that rescued _you_."

Jyn has thought of it, dreamed of it. When she learned Alderaan was gone and thought Cassian had vanished with it, her grief seemed had seemed to big for her skin, tearing its way out as anger. But it hadn't been enough to push out her guilt. She had sent him to his death. All of Rogue One's surviving members were on the ship, but she pushed Cassian onto it, when he might have survived if she had kept him with her.

Maybe it would have meant no rescue ship from an Imperial pilot. Maybe she would have burned from the Death Star's destructive force with Cassian in her arms, light rising to swallow them whole. They would have been dust, mingling together with the ashes of a world. An ending. But she had, selfishly, hoped for it.

His laughter, sharp and jagged, twists her insides.

"I wished for it, at first." His words imply that, eventually, he had not. The knot in her stomach settles. "Not my finest moment."

Despair lurks beneath his words, and she tilts her head. She cannot help it. Had their brief few days fighting side by side made any impact? It's difficult for her to imagine. She fled, or she drifted, and she rebelled, but Cassian's fight is decades old. His belief laces through his bones. It underlies his words, and he had continued the same fight after she was gone. He would see the battle to the end, or until his end.

"Did it really change anything?"

His eyes narrow, face smoothing like ice. It should shatter the comfortable quiet into cutting shards, but it doesn't. Jyn asked the question for an answer, and she waits for it, waits for the moment the facade melts again.

"I don't know," he admits. "But I would have found you. Offered you a place here. Does that count for something?"

The warmth in her chest blooms into fire, defiant against Hoth's frigid cold. A star ignites beneath her rib cage, and she wants to reach across the foot of space and touch him, to see if he burns as hot as she does under his skin. Her fingers remember. She wants it again, like she wants his touch across her jaw, her cheek.

"Yes," she breathes, and gives in. She knocks her knee against his, and holds it there.

"What happened, after Scarif?" Cassian asks, nothing but patient.

They aren't even skin to skin. It feels like the most dangerous moment yet, like filling her skin with iron filaments and touching industrial magnets. If she spills her secrets now, no matter what, she would leave part of herself behind in this room.

But the truth is, whether she stops her words or not, part of her will always lie here. Jyn will not give into fear, and she will look this in the eye.

"There was an Imperial pilot," she begins.

\--

Baze and Chirrut return to Echo Base the next day, no less than four recruits in tow. Jyn shoves through the growing crowd to reach them. Half of those gathered are under the age of sixteen, or whatever passes for childhood among Ithorians. Chirrut and Baze, Cassian told her as they talked, are not a formal part of the Rebellion. They come and go as they please--have earned trust many times over, from many others.

The sight of the two of them together, Baze following Chirrut, tips the world back into alignment.

Predictably, Chirrut turns to her first. His moment of stillness is so brief, she might have imagined it, but then he's weaving through the crowd.

"You've become famous," she teases, when he's close enough she might hear his reply.

"Only among the most important of us," Chirrut answers.

"Teach one child to use the Force and suddenly you're everyone's favorite tutor." Baze's face relaxes, easier than Chirrut to read. He grins, fierce and true, without a hint of irritation in his face or his expression.

"Baze says this only because he teaches philosophy and heavy weapons, and _he's_ everyone's favorite."

Baze snorts. His attention returns to her. " _You_ do not look dead."

Jyn spreads her hands. She doesn't brace herself for recriminations, only realizes afterwards that her shoulders are still loose, and--she has missed this. Someone's easy faith, the feeling that someone's in her corner, or even the knowledge that somewhere, two good people had loved one another and had some modicum of peace.

"And you have met the captain already," Chirrut adds. "You're wearing something of his."

She bites her lip. Baze looks her up and down, and laughs. He claps her on the shoulder, and the gesture is so familiar, tears prick the corners of her eyes.

"You mean _my_ necklace?" she says, to Chirrut.

"Of course."

She cannot help it. She throws her arms around Chirrut -- Chirrut, who had always known how to ask the right questions. Chirrut, the first she trusted enough to indulge her curiosity about kyber crystals.

Jyn missed this.

"We have missed you too, Jyn," Chirrut says. For once, Baze doesn't disagree.

\--

Cassian watches from the other end of the hanger, reports and facts to memorize in hand. She doesn't see him, but he sees the grin on her face, and thinks--

 _Maybe_.

Hope swells in his chest like unbound light.

\--

In a twist that makes Jyn believe in the Force almost as much as Chirrut does, her ship arrives on Hoth two days later. She finds out by virtue of her astromech droid appearing from behind a corner, wheeling around her feet for all of three seconds, before rolling off to see the rest of the base--an adventure discovered after all, like it wanted.

She's standing in front of the memorial pillar again, reading the names. She has never kept anything physical to acknowledge friends' deaths, and always thought it a betrayal to. (Memories of friends, a different matter, but she lost those tokens anyway.) Sacrifices were acknowledged by the victories Partisans won, in the name of the fallen, but -- Mon Mothma had said something very similar. Someone chiseled the names of soldiers on this memorial, but that was not all they had done.

Even so, _Galen Erso_ shoots through her vision, white and hot and glaring.

Thunder rolls through her mind, rain leeching warmth in a sharper, colder way than Hoth's chill did, and she can taste ashes on her tongue, see her father's face fall slack.

They had done this. And then they had spread his name through the galaxy as their martyr.

"Baze said you were back on base," says a voice behind her.

She does not recognize the speaker at first, contemplates the utility of ignoring him, to make him go away. Heat pricks against her skin.

"Jyn," the person says, with such relief she turns. The breath leaves her lungs.

Bodhi Rook stands tall, straighter than she has ever seen him, and more eye-catching too in an orange flight-suit. His goggles perch in the space between his brows and his hairline, and beneath, his expression twists into a smile.

She hugs him before she thinks about it, before she registers the motion of standing and turning. He gets, she interprets from his subsequent cough, a mouthful of fur.

"Welcome back," she tells him once she's drawn back.

He grins. "Shouldn't I be saying that to you? Welcome back to the Rebellion? To the land of the living?"

"That too."

He studies her face, her distraction, as they hear her astromech droid beeping in the distance. Her grin, listening to her astromech being scolded by a different combination of whistle and beeps.

"Brianna Sotar?" he tries. When she nods, he studies her a little longer, then tells her, "I brought your ship back."

"Thank you," she says blankly. "I didn't expect it back so soon."

He shrugs. "General Draven requested it. Senator Mothma agreed."

Ice plunges down her spine. "He sent a starfighter pilot for it?"

It implies he pays greater attention to her than she thought. General Draven had passed her rooms away and forced her to find another bunk to sleep in, but had otherwise left her alone until now.

"I was in the sector, securing Arkanis," Bodhi says, which isn't really an answer.

She shakes her head. Bodhi has two jobs in the Rebellion, Cassian had told her: transitioning new recruits who were not certain of themselves, and acting as a pilot on the front lines. It had given the new recruits reassurance that someone who stammered, who had been uncertain, who had defected, could become so well trusted and liked. Bodhi's time has become too valuable to waste, bringing back the ship of someone who they thought would leave.

"Chirrut said I might find you here," Bodhi says eventually, into her quiet contemplation. He gestures behind her.

The names stretch beyond her head.

"There are a lot of names," she says.

"The Alliance battled above Scarif," Bodhi says. "They followed us there. Some people just needed the opportunity to rebel."

Jyn has heard. Jyn knows. It's different hearing so from Bodhi, who had acted on his belief on what was right, not in any one structure or power.

"My father's name's here," she says, because Bodhi had known him too.

To her surprise, there is no anger. Bodhi nods. "I carved it there myself."

" _Why_ ," she asks, and she means not just the action, but the intent behind every line of propaganda that involves a defected Imperial scientist.

Bodhi looks her right in the eye. "Because he told me to do what was right."

Her rage flares and fades in the same instant. There's no subterfuge in his answer, nothing political. Galen Erso died without Jyn really knowing the man he had become, and she rails against the idea his symbol used by his killers. But Bodhi's eyes are patient, and he remembers Galen, and she thinks he fights on, in part, for Galen too.

"Thank you," she manages.

There is a pause, less tense than the one that came before, and broken by a rather different topic:

"Jyn," Bodhi stammers at last. "Isn't that Cassian's?"

The fur lining the parka's hood pricks her fingers, spiky with ice. She doesn't mind. And though Bodhi cannot see, beneath the parka, she wears one of Cassian's undershirts, clean and crisp where her shirt hadn't been after battle. Jyn borrowed items from his drawers she refuses to return, not yet. She does not want to give them back.

"I left all my changes of clothes on the ship you brought back," she mutters. "I needed _something_."

Bodhi stares at her, hard, for a moment.

And then he begins to laugh.

\--

Cassian is standing by her ship when she arrives at the hanger, eager for the sight of something _hers_. He meets her eyes, sees the light in them, how she wears the coat Mon Mothma gave her instead of his parka, and looks, suddenly, very tired.

"I want to go to the surface," she says.

He takes her there.

\--

For once, Hoth's surface isn't covered an ice storm scouring everything clean and raw. Gray light hangs like a veil across the sky, stars glittering in the distance as they fade in promise of dawn. Cassian scans the horizon by habit, but his eyes are drawn back to her. Of course they are. He's not sure if he memorizes her -- the curve of her smile, the light in her eyes, the way her hair's plastered to her forehead -- because of uncertainty, or because of fear, of _certainty_. He watches, either way.

"You have your ship back," he tries.

She shrugs. "Draven's made it clear he wants me out."

Draven had ensured her bunks were assigned elsewhere, with a flux of trusted recruits relocating to Hoth. He hasn't done much else, as far as Cassian knows. Cassian would wonder about that, but the answer is obvious--Draven sees some use in Jyn Erso, and is forcing her to make the choice. Either she chains herself to a rank, or he will do more to make her leave. He's too busy to do anything else requiring more effort.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," he says.

She raises her brows, waiting for more information. He contemplates how best to explain it without manipulating her either way--though Draven himself very much meant to manipulate.

"He wants you to decide."

She scowls. "He wants to make me miserable. Don't say it, Cassian."

"What would I say?" He would smile, if his heart weren't thumping against his ribcage in small explosions.

"That he's too busy. Everyone has time to make other people miserable." Jyn rubs a hand across her face. "I was happy, once. I managed it."

His mouth twitches, his smile wry. A year later, and the details of her file are still burned into his memory. "On Lah'mu?"

She shakes her head. "More recently."

He quirks an eyebrow.

"I haven't had a home for a long time," she murmurs, "and the galaxy's a lonely place." Her hands curl around herself, around the heavy weight of her jacket, and he wants to reach for her. She glances at him. "But some things make it less lonely."

His stomach churns, hope fizzing through his body in waves. He feels heavy and light at the same time, like he's standing at the edge of a precipice and about to take a step forwards. A fighter will catch him before a second passes, or it will not, but the only way forwards is to jump.

"Will you stay?" he dares ask at last. The wasteland is cold and frozen, and light licks at the edges of the world, and he does not look away from her.

Her face is pensive as she contemplates the answer, like her thoughts are in a distant nebula.

"I survived for a year after Scarif," she says eventually. "I even believed in something. I didn't need to stay. I _don't_ need to."

Cassian's eyes close for a beat, nails digging into his palms. He stares into the light of the horizon. "Where will you go?"

Her silence stretches, and he thinks she'll avoid an answer, will vanish like stardust dispersing after a supernova. The galaxy's a big place, and determined person can hide in the hundred billion stars of the galaxy without a trace.

"I don't need to stay," she murmurs, "but I think I want to."

Cassian's breath catches. He hasn't misheard, _please_ let her words be real.

"I don't way to stay on base," she adds, and he cannot hear anything else over her. "I don't want to play Draven's games. But I want to fight back properly again, and I want someone to come back to. Besides, none of you stay here much either, do you?"

She is expecting an answer that isn't Cassian staring at her existence, he realizes.

"No," he manages.

"Then my place isn't on base either."

"There are other generals," he says, like he had days earlier. This time, she nods, firm and certain, and the thought that she will _stay_ fills his head with static.

Her hand crosses the space between them, tightens around his, firm and solid and profoundly real. Her image was a ghost in the corner of his eye; she is not. He keeps his eyes open, fixed onto hers. She doesn't look away.

Her smile is like a punch to the gut, like hope in darkness, like one good deed joining the blood on his hands. Her free hand curls around his neck, digging in like he's _hers_. There's a war in the stars and the press of duty, the Rebellion calling, but this moment belongs to them. He names it what it is.

"Welcome home."

She tugs him down with her palm curled around the back of his neck, and her lips burn like a brand on his forehead. He had forgotten heat like this could exist, blistering through his skin, spreading through his body until every nerve fiber snaps and fires. She smells like engine oil and smoke and a bite of cold. It's not close enough, not firm enough, even though her nails must be leaving marks on his skin.

He pulls away from the touch, and comes back to capture her lips. Her mouth opens beneath his, sweet and warm and so very alive, and he never wants to leave her arms, never wants to let go of her, this, this moment in time where he holds her close.

The kiss is secondary. When they part, still so close her breaths mingle with his, he leans his forehead against hers.

"Say that to me again later," she orders, the soft puff of air a teasing ghost, "each time I come back." The promise in the simple words is unbearable, leaves him aching.

He holds her tighter.

"I will," he says, and it's a vow of its own.

\--

He does.

\--

fin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In order of appearance:  
> 1\. [Arkanis](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Arkanis)  
> 2\. [Sabine, Ezra, Hera and Chopper / The Ghost Crew](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Spectres), or some of them anyway.  
> 3\. [Thane Kyrell](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Thane_Kyrell)
> 
> And that's it, folks! Thank you for coming along for the ride. The support for this story has been amazing, and I can't say how much every word has meant. And as always, ~~comments feed my ego~~ I adore every bit of feedback.


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